Creaking Rattling Passenger seat

[wlong01]

Have noticed the passenger seat is starting to make noises when there's a passenger sitting in it and the car is turning either left or right. The turns can be slight like a bend in the road, not necessarily a full turn.

Is this the seat rail problem?

Anybody else experience this? The car is just two years old this month, purchased in April of 2015 and I only have 11,500 miles on it.

 

[yrwei52]

Yeah I believe that's seat rail although most have had "rocking" issue and it's on the driver seat. I guess visiting your Mazda dealer is inevitable unfortunately!

 

[xwedge]

Have noticed the passenger seat is starting to make noises when there's a passenger sitting in it and the car is turning either left or right. The turns can be slight like a bend in the road, not necessarily a full turn.

Is this the seat rail problem?

Anybody else experience this? The car is just two years old this month, purchased in April of 2015 and I only have 11,500 miles on it.

Might want to see if something got jammed in the rails. I actually had a pen in the seat rails that was causing those exact symptoms. It was a "clicking" sound.

 

[Splinter Cell]

This seems to be a common enough problem on the CX-5, my own included. The seat frame is attached to the floor rails via 4 pivot arms that raise/lower the seat. The arms are bolted to the rail at the bottom (using a split-bushing) but press-fit into the seat frame at the top. This is where the weakness is, the front press-fit joint loosens slightly leading to the creaking noise and slight rocking motion. Ideally, this design should have had thrust washers front and rear before being press fit it in but it doesnt unfortunately.

The dealer fix will be to replace the lower seat frame and rail assembly which is a lot of tearing apart. My fix was to unbolt the front pivot arm from the rail and rotate it 180 degree up out of the way. Word of caution, be careful not to damage the rear edge of split bushing as you rotate it past the floor rail, pull the arm towards you as you rotate. I ran a zip tie thru the seat frame directly under the press fit joint and pulled tightly. Then I rotated the pivot arm back down over the flat side of the zip tie and bolted it back on to the floor rail.

This puts just enough tension on the arm to stop the noise/movement. It does make raising/lowering the seat frame a little harder but that doesnt bother me I never adjust the seat height anyway. Didnt take photos at the time but took some today to help visualize what I did.

 

[Driver 1]

oh god yes!

took me a year to figure out where the sound comes from. i don't sit properly anymore i float my ass from the seat all the time. no more annoying sound for now.

My plan is to sleeve a teflon bushing, maybe, not sure yet don't have time to take the seat apart see the real problem.