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Guess I'll be visiting my friendly dealer again...maybe, I'll ask if they got the super fix to my tripping tranny problem!
I don't think the fog light problem is new; I had heard of this months ago when I first got my MPV. It just hit home on top of all the other stuff when I got the notice in the mail.
BTW, the improvemnts to the 2004 are very nice.
But please do not underestimate the hassle and aggravation the transmission will cause you. A test drive is not sufficient to winnow out good vans from bad--I test drove my 2004 before buying and it took three days for the problem to show up.
My advice: Do not buy a 2004 before the tranny problems are sorted out.
kirstie_h
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It's also based on personal experience. I had a VW Jetta model year that was supposed to be disastrous, and I never spent a penny on it. Good luck. I also had an Altima that was alleged to be reliable, but spent most of its time in the shop. Bad luck.
I'm not saying that the problems experienced aren't genuine - they are. And it's truly frustrating to be "that one," especially when everyone else who owns the same model doesn't report reliability problems.
kirstie_h
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Secondly, Mazda is not particularly easy to deal with over this issue...their first response to me was that "....I would have to change my driving habits..." Of course they know nothing of my driving habits. You have to be really persistant with them (at least in my case) to get them to even acknowkledge the issue.
Why should new car buyers have to play roulette?
You get all the information(lift the hood) you can, take a test drive, sort it out, roll the dice and take the plunge...
It's called LIFE..... Ye, gotta love it....
Merry Christmas One and all (Opps, not PC) (snicker)
Tj
Other than that, the MPV is high on my hot list.
These problems are very expensive to repair, not like a squeak or a rattle. What value does this board or CR have if in the end it comes down to rolling the dice?
Pick your vehicle with the problems you can live with.
The value of this board is to share information regarding how to best handle issues when they come up.
Note that I specifically didn't include boards like this one for determining reliability/ purchase risk.
You cannot take a survey of complaints on any internet board as an indicator of reliability. Period. This board is not a representative sample of owners or vehicles. As much as we'd all like to take away a sense of peace of mind stemming from other owner's personal experiences, rigorous, verifiable, and statistically valid information about reliability is NOT HERE.
What IS here is a sense of an individual dealer's and Mazda's responsiveness, "tips and tricks" gathered through experience, and information specific to a brand/model/problem that may not be published willingly elsewhere. Information that can be vital to gaining satisfaction from your dealer/maker.
You're playing the odds no matter what you buy. Note that Honda has also had "lots" of tranny issues, and Toyota has had "lots" of engine sludge issues (reported on Edmunds, but more importantly, substantiated elsewhere and ultimately confirmed by changes in policy by those makers, even if they continue to deny the respective issue officially), so it's not just Mazda or any other make we care to single out.
I know this is stating the obvious, but sometimes it's helpful to remind ourselves of the facts...
-brianV
If people complain about MPV's transmission problem and Mazda says that they are working on a fix is enough for any reasonable buyer to stay away from them until fixed.
Wise man say, to choose the lesser of the two evils, you are still choosing evil!
In the real-world, no sample you take will be truly representative against all conceivable criteria. You take the best sample available using random methodologies, and weight the results appropriately against a known reference.
I spent 5 years as a market reseacher in a leading research institute in Germany, so I'm familiar with the nitty gritty details.
CR's work is generally sound from a methodological perspective, although their interpretation of individual results is open to debate (as are everybody's).
-brianV
However, since the van is basically unchanged from the 2002 model, you can get *some* sense of your risk from looking at prior model years (and that's as good as you're going to do).
Unfortunately, the last time I looked, they didn't have enough data on the '02's or '03's (not enough respondents in the survey that owned MPV's), so CR didn't publish the results for those model years (correctly, I might add, per accepted statistical methods).
So the MPV's reputation for good reliability, excellent in fact, is based on the 2000-01 model as far as CR is concerned, so far as I know.
Those model years had the 2.5l engine and the 4-speed transmission, so you can't really compare them for engine or drivetrain (but you can for pretty much everything else).
As mentioned by others, all you can do is get the best information available, make your decision and roll the dice. I understand that's precious little consolation if you're driving a van with problems.
I guess what I'm trying to say is try not to get down on yourself. You did what you could. Mazda will sort this out as soon as they can.
In a sense, Tomj5's theory that it's contamination is "good news". If he's right, for the cost of a power flush (small hundreds) you should be able to fix this permanently.
Maybe you can push Mazda/your dealer for covering this as an experiment ?
Hope this helps,
-brianV
I guess Mazda will get more problems if more Ford parts are used in Mazda cars.
I'd let NHTSA decide if it's a safety issue.
At a minimum, Mazda could and should be doing more by way of customer communication. Bad things can happen to any make or model. What makes the difference is how you respond to legitimate issues - or not.
Nothing makes people angrier than perceiving that they have a legimate and serious complaint, and the manufacturer just doesn't care. From what I've gathered (our van is fine, knock on wood), I think Mazda and its dealer network are guilty of not responding well.
As to Ford parts, the tranny is a Jatco. The only Ford component is the engine block. I think even the ECM is Mazda's.
-brianV
How many MPV's have been sold in the model years affected?
Of that number, approximately how many people have posted here indicating a problem?
What is the likelihood that a substantial number of additional people have experienced the problem but have not found this forum to express their concerns?
And, bottom line, what do we suspect to be the approximate percentage of vehicles in affected model years that have experienced the "hard shift" issue (i.e., how "unlucky" are those that actually have it)?
It strikes me that some discussion of whether this forum presents a -relevant- sample size is significant to anyone considering a purchase of an '04 without more definitive info from Mazda. Is there a significant silent majority out there who have this van and have experienced no tranny problems or should we expect that the problem exists in a high enough percentage of vehicles (say, over 3-5% of those sold) that there's a reasonable likelihood of experiencing it?
there are other sites out there, I know of one such club that I participate in as well.
-Brian
I have to say that I was very close to buying an MPV, but the tranny issue made me re-evaluate that decision. So I've ordered a Prius, to get in line (fully refundable deposit) and will decide in the spring which way to go. Maybe by then the hard shift problem will be licked.
I personally have been requested to do the CR surveys in the past for various things. It's so generic at best for the questions they offer and the applications. By the time your done answering all the questions, your head is spinning and I think the wrong impressions come through. Yes, I like the MPV. No, I hate the tranny and nuisance things that keep coming up.
Our store is one of only 20 Quality monitoring dealers in the country. I am not surprised that the other 600 dealers do not yet know how to fix a problem they cannot duplicate and haven't seen much.
The Mazda6 had a big scare on the check engine light at first too. It turned out to be a 20 cent clip on a vacuum hose. But plenty of dealers couldn't figure it out early on which makes owners nervous.
Fact is that Mazda (and the MPV) has had an excellent repair record. As cars become more complex, there is more to sort through to determine the problem. Isn't it the computer that determines whenn the tranny will shift?
That doesn't = bad tranny.
In my 3 years of driving all the model years of new MPV's I have yet to experience any issues.
Give your local dealer a little time to get the answers they need to take care of your problem.
Sales were very good this year compared to last year, for the record, until July, then they fell off. This parallels what I've seen for some other manufacturers, by the way. Profitability is up so far for the year, for what it's worth (I think you have better odds buying from a successful maker than from one that's struggling, personally.)
I did a quick check, and it appears that they have sold about 60000 MPV's between 01/2002 and 09/2003 nationwide. I'm assuming that all of these have the 5-speed (the numbers are not broken out by model year, so there's a little "fudge" here, but probably not much - some of these units were probably 2001 model year with the 4-speed).
If we take 60000 units sold as "in the ballpark", the number of complaints here and on other boards pales by comparison. 600 reported failures would be 1 percent. I doubt this board has seen even 30 individual cases.
Even accounting for sampling error (the "silent majority" mentioned above), this is almost certainly a rare issue. There is almost certainly NOT a "silent majority" of people with problem trannies - far from it.
As a rule of thumb, mail surveys have a response rate of somewhere near 10% (using a good list, and assuming a whole bunch of stuff that I don't want to get into here...). Even if we assume that for every reported problem here, 9 others exist that have not been reported, and we go with 30 individual cases as above, Mazda is facing a reported failure rate of maybe 0.5%. That would be 1 in 200. Not good, but not unprecedented either as I understand it.
I suspect that this estimate is perhaps a bit high. Even so, that would still make just 300 failures nationwide over 2 years, assuming a reporting rate of just 10%. This also explains why individual dealerships haven't been seeing many of these cases. I don't know how many dealerships Mazda has, but it's more than 300 by quite a bit.
If Edmund's reach is better than 10%, then Mazda's fortunes improve considerably. If the reporting rate is 30% (1 in ~3 failures gets reported here, which *might* be plausible, hard to tell...), then the overall failure rate drops to 0.17%, or 1 in 600, or 100 failures nationwide in 2 years.
Of course, the converse is also true, if Edmund's reach is much worse than 10%, then Mazda has a real problem on it's hands and better get on it. I suspect that truth lies somewhere between 10% and 30% for our purposes here. The vast majority of Mazda's target users have access to the web, if not at home than at work, and most will have heard of Edmund's by now, since they're starting to appear in mass advertising references ("rated so and so by edmund's.com...").
To put this in perspective, Honda acted on their tranny issue (offered extended warranties to all owners) when the reported failure rate climbed well above 1%, as I understand it.
You have to remember that people who have a problem are FAR FAR FAR more likely to report it than people who don't. The overwhelming "silent majority" (99.5% or so) consists of satisfied customers.
I'm not sure if this helps, but there you have it.
-brianV
Steve.
You have to look at the big picture. You cannot extrapolate from just one data point.
-brianV
Since we get very little snow and have quite mild winters in Denver proper, the Kumho's seemed the way to go. They're reportedly laid out for milder conditions and better wear than most snows, but outperform all-seasons when it gets slick. Drive west 30 minutes from our house and you're in another world alltogether.
Picked them up from Tirerack for $470 including shipping. Popped them on last night. They're quiet and handle well in the dry. We'll see how they do in the slick shortly...
-brianV
I head they modified the TCM in 2004 in order to fix the 2003 problems.
By the way, I don't think you can say that "There are probably many dealers with NO cases". Possibly, yes. Probably, no.
Steve.
Hard shifting be it caused by the CPU or transmission troubles can't be healthy for the insides of the transmission. How long can these transmissions hold up under these conditions? It also maybe shorting the useful life of the transmission.
No matter how you slice it, this isn't good for the transmission and other parts of the van.
Maybe this isn't important to Mazda as long as people keep buying MPV's!
We also know that there are 10's, not hundreds, of reported cases here at Edmund's and other boards.
Those are the known facts. From experience with comparable reporting methods, we can estimate the reporting rate at Edmund's within reasonable bounds. It's not 100%, and it's probably not 1% either. This is where the uncertainty lies.
By "doing the math", we can get a sense of what the numbers mean if the reporting rate lies in the range that we believe is likely, given our experience with other tools. (I DID spend 5 years conducting large scale international surveys, guys.)
So what we have is not a random "guesstimate" that someone pulled out of their hat, like you pick a Lotto number. It's an estimate with upper and lower bounds, based on the facts available today.
There is a large difference between those 2 concepts.
Anyone reading these boards lately might come to the conclusion that 90% of MPV owners are having transmission issues. The far more likely probability is that this ratio is reversed.
Unfortunately, the same analysis can be interpreted many ways. If you tell someone that 99.5% of MPV's have great transmissions, that sounds good. If you tell someone that the failure rate is 1 in 200, that sounds bad. In fact, both figures are based on precisely the same information and the same assumptions, and have identical levels of uncertainty.
That's where the saying "There's lies, da*n lies, and statistics..." comes from.
Steve, based on my analysis, and the sense that Mazda has something like 600 dealerships (I'm not certain of that number, but I'm pretty sure it's in the ballpark), I can safely say that there are "probably many dealerships with NO cases". We have sufficient if not compelling reason to believe that this is a relatively rare problem.
If you conducted a nationwide survey of dealerships, you could get to a better (i.e. more reliable) estimate of the number of cases out there. You could get the same level of certainty by conducting a nationwide survey of owners. Short of that, you can't.
-brianV
And they should be following up with everybody to be certain that things are happening. If they believe they have identified the problem, then they should be communicating that knowledge proactively.
People don't develop software unless they know what problem they're trying to solve. I would like to know if "we're working on it" means they're still analyzing the problem (they don't know what's wrong), or if they're actively developing a fix (they know what's wrong, but haven't worked out how to fix it). There's a huge difference in those 2 answers - potentially months, the testing cycle alone will take weeks if done properly.
Either way, they need to let people know that 1) their problems are of real concern, 2) a real solution is in the works, and 3) when that solution is expected.
They should also offer everyone affected a free extended warranty on the transmission like Honda did.
If they did those things, wouldn't everyone feel an heck of lot better ?
-brianV
If there was a redesign, then I agree, that's not a good sign. Sometimes software "fixes" address one issue and create 2 others... If this has happened, then Mazda needs to look at their testing program hard. They have the resources to do this right. Mistakes happen, sure. But mistakes on top of mistakes shouldn't happen.
-brianV (application test architect at a Fortune 200 firm)
We know that 60K MPV were sold. What we don't know is how many of these people are having this problem and don't bother to go on line here or elsewhere to complain. How do we come up with that number? This type of testing is too thin to have meaningful results in my opinion.
To say that the number falls between 1-100 is too large of an area.
This is like a doctor trying to diagnose a patient over the phone.
We don't know how many people don't bother to report their problem here, that is correct. But if we did, we could calculate how many total people have a problem as I demonstrated in my earlier post.
I'm estimating that as many as 1 in 10 people who have a problem report it here, and perhaps as many as 1 in 3 or so. I believe these to be reasonably conservative numbers, and here's why:
I'm basing that estimate on the response rate of mail surveys (about 10%). Mail surveys have a notoriously low response rate. But on the other hand, people are not very motivated to respond to a simple survey, whereas they are very motivated to solve their transmission problems. If you're having a serious issue with your van, know about Edmund's and have access to the internet, chances are you're going to come here and ask questions, no ?
So the limiting factor is the number of people who know about Edmund's, think it's a good place to get help with a car problem and own an MPV with an issue.
How many people know about Edmund's and own an MPV? Well, what kind of people own MPV's? How much do they typically make? More specifically (earnings has bearing on this), how many of them have access to the internet ? How many of them have seen a car ad on TV talking about Edmund's, or have done a search on the internet looking for info and found it that way?
The MPV sells to a fairly saavy crowd of reasonable means who do their homework before they buy and are open to products that diverge from the mainstream (larger mini-vans). They're attracted to it's smaller size and handling prowess. Reliability is important to us. They would be Honda or Toyota customers if not Mazda customers. Most would not seriously consider a DC van for reliability reasons. We're maybe a little more price sensitive than the top-tier of van buyers (Honda and Toyota today). We tend to check CR before we buy. Not every MPV owner fits this description, but most do.
Given that description, we can assume that close to 100% of MPV owners have access to the internet either at home or at work today. Edmund's has worked very hard in recent years to increase their awareness levels (people who have heard about them), and are now being referred to in mass broadcast ad media (TV). And doing an internet search on Mazda MPV is going to lead you here pretty quick.
So close to all MPV owners have access to the internet, and I'm estimating that somewhere between 10% and 30% have heard of Edmund's and think it's a good place to get info when they have a problem.
I've tried to make conservative assumptions throughout my analysis. Perhaps you disagree, I respect that. There is some uncertainty in this part of the analysis. But hopefully you can follow my reasoning now.
Please understand that I'm not trying to make light of this issue. I'm trying to put it in perspective.
Good luck, and stay on Mazda for more information. You have a right to be treated decently and taken seriously, especially if you treat them professionally (hard to do when you're angry, I've been there).
(more than) 'nuff said,
-brianV
kirstie_h
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