My Automotive Experiences

As you can probably guess from the background and above logo, I've got a real preference for the Mazda brand of automobiles.  (All of the pictures below have links to bigger-sized versions of the images.)

My Mazda fetish started back in September of 1993 when my old car (a 1984 Nissan Maxima) threw its bearings in the manual transmission and the car started to sound like an angry vacuum cleaner whenever it was in anything other than 4th gear.

Well, I went to the local Mazda dealership after hearing some good things about the '93 Protégé and decided to take a test drive.  The 1.8L SOHC engine in the DX had a lot more power than what I was expecting in a car of that size. I spent 5 minutes with it and was ready to buy.  After owning used cars for all of my adult life, I was finally going to get a new car!  The sticker price (I still have it framed) was just over $10,000 for a new DX with a manual transmission.  After giving me $1,000 trade on the old Nissan (they were being kind to me), I financed the rest and drove off the lot with my new car (with a mere 11 miles on the odometer).  Unlike the picture above, my DX was beige.  Other than that, there wasn't much of a difference.

Thus began my love affair with the Protégé.  A year after I bought the car I put in a Pioneer 6 disc CD player (mounted under the passenger seat, which made for easy swapping of CD caddies while on the road).  Now that I had my tunes (a crucial ingredient in my driving habit), I could drive around at will and enjoy the ride.  As an example of how much I like to drive, here are some of the places that I'd been to while I had my Protégé:

(all trips originate from Lexington, SC, USA)
-  Chicago, IL - five trips
-  Virginia Beach, VA - seven trips
-  Madison, WI - one trip
-  Rockville, MD - one trip
-  Baltimore, MD - one trip
-  Toronto, Ontario, CA - two trips

I'd managed to accumulate 179,231 miles over the years that I owned my Protégé.  However, on October 21, 1999 a deer on an apparent kamikaze mission slammed into the right front panel of the car by running at full steam from the shoulder of a 2 lane road at 6:00 in the morning.  The insurance adjustor estimated that over $4,000 damage had been done in the collision, totaling it out.  I was a bit put-off by the whole thing because:

a) I'd paid the car off a year early and had been enjoying not having to shell out money on the vehicle in the form of monthly car payments
b) That was the second time in 4 years that I'd had an encounter with a deer.  The first happened the day after Thanksgiving on a freezing night on a barren stretch of I-95.   That deer hit had caused $5,750 worth of damage to the front end.

This car was mostly trouble-free.  I'd like to say that absolutely nothing went wrong with the car, but I'd be wrong.  Given that I was the only owner of the car, everything that went wrong with it happened while it was in my possession.

- Radiator tank cracked at the top around 150000 miles.  Radiator had to be replaced
- Battery died around 80000 miles.
- Seatbelt sensor for the passive restraint system malfunctioned from day one.  It would beep sometimes if I shifted or moved in my seat and was the major annoyance of my car
- the air conditioning compressor was apparently sucking in outside air because the a/c system was badly over pressurized.  I have no idea how it was happening, just that it was.  The thing that gave it away was the "ratcheting" sound that the compressor would make whenever it engaged.  The last two years saw the system not really cool the interior of the car at all.  I even had the system completely voided and recharged from empty with coolant at a rather high expense to me.  It stayed cool for about a month and then the ratcheting sound returned and the cooler temperatures disappeared.
- the driver-side CV joint died at about 120000.  Less than one year later the other CV joint (at about 146000 miles) crapped out.
- 130000 miles saw both headlight lamps burn out
- Disc brake pads replaced every 85000 miles
- Drum brake pads replaced at 165000 miles