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Guest2018
Does your 2016-2018 CX-9 have the same characteristic as seen in the photos below?
Been driving in the canyons having fun lately (pressing pretty firmly into the turns). Pulled into a gas station to fill up and decided to check the Rear Upper Mounts for each strut while the gas was flowing. What I found was interesting. It is either an imbalance of some weird kind in either the Right or Left rear strut assembly, or it is an optical illusion caused by the way the shrouds surrounding the struts have been cut and shaped by Mazda in production.
Just to be sure, take a close look at your Left and Right rear strut assemblies. This area is just inside the rear wheel well on both sides of the vehicle directly above both rear wheel tires. You will see both the Left and Right rear strut assemblies. Notice the Upper Mount on both the Left and Right rear sides. It is a metal component bolts attached that look like this:
Now, notice the two pics below:
Left Rear
Right Rear
If you were simply pumping gas and did not know any better while walking from side-to-side looking inside the wheel well of both these Left and Right rear areas, you might swear that one side of your CX-9 was higher than the other according to what you were seeing. One the Left rear side, you can barely see the Rear Upper Mount and its attached bolts. However, on the Right rear side, you can clearly see the exposed Rear Upper Mount along with its attached bolts. Both are firmly in place they way they should be.
At first glance, I thought somehow one side had been hyper-extended, or highly compressed near the upper mount area but was not sure which side was in error. What made things worse is that fact that measuring the distance between the top of each wheel and the wheel well itself, showed that both sides were the exact same height. So, I drove home - thinking my vehicle was somehow unbalanced in the rear.
I then took these two photos. That's when I noticed what appears to be a difference in the way the cloth shrouding is cut on both sides. They don't appear to be cut with exactly the same shape or geometry. The right side shroud looks like it has a deeper cut than the left side shroud, but just as a sanity check I thought I would bring this to your attention.
Who can confirm this on their 2016-2018 CX-9? If your focus was solely upon the hardware like mine was at the gas station, then you could easily mistake this for some kind of strut malfunction or something equally as strange. You would then step back, look at the vehicle from directly in the rear, measure the height between the top of each rear wheel and the bottom of the wheel well itself and conclude that you were either going crazy, or suffering some kind of optical illusion. You don't notice this until you can see BOTH struts at the exact same time which you cannot physically do while standing on one side or the other. In other words, you won't even think about an optical illusion until you can see side-by-side the same general area under each wheel well, which is what the photos do for you.
I hope this is an optimal illusion because I cannot find a measurable (physical) imbalance anywhere in the rear of the vehicle no matter what I use as objective offsetting measuring points form the vehicle to the ground. It is perfectly balanced no matter how I measure things. So, this has got to be caused by shroud cuts that are dissimilar, right?
Please tell me that you see the same thing in your 2016-2018 CX-9.
Been driving in the canyons having fun lately (pressing pretty firmly into the turns). Pulled into a gas station to fill up and decided to check the Rear Upper Mounts for each strut while the gas was flowing. What I found was interesting. It is either an imbalance of some weird kind in either the Right or Left rear strut assembly, or it is an optical illusion caused by the way the shrouds surrounding the struts have been cut and shaped by Mazda in production.
Just to be sure, take a close look at your Left and Right rear strut assemblies. This area is just inside the rear wheel well on both sides of the vehicle directly above both rear wheel tires. You will see both the Left and Right rear strut assemblies. Notice the Upper Mount on both the Left and Right rear sides. It is a metal component bolts attached that look like this:

Now, notice the two pics below:
Left Rear

Right Rear

If you were simply pumping gas and did not know any better while walking from side-to-side looking inside the wheel well of both these Left and Right rear areas, you might swear that one side of your CX-9 was higher than the other according to what you were seeing. One the Left rear side, you can barely see the Rear Upper Mount and its attached bolts. However, on the Right rear side, you can clearly see the exposed Rear Upper Mount along with its attached bolts. Both are firmly in place they way they should be.
At first glance, I thought somehow one side had been hyper-extended, or highly compressed near the upper mount area but was not sure which side was in error. What made things worse is that fact that measuring the distance between the top of each wheel and the wheel well itself, showed that both sides were the exact same height. So, I drove home - thinking my vehicle was somehow unbalanced in the rear.
I then took these two photos. That's when I noticed what appears to be a difference in the way the cloth shrouding is cut on both sides. They don't appear to be cut with exactly the same shape or geometry. The right side shroud looks like it has a deeper cut than the left side shroud, but just as a sanity check I thought I would bring this to your attention.
Who can confirm this on their 2016-2018 CX-9? If your focus was solely upon the hardware like mine was at the gas station, then you could easily mistake this for some kind of strut malfunction or something equally as strange. You would then step back, look at the vehicle from directly in the rear, measure the height between the top of each rear wheel and the bottom of the wheel well itself and conclude that you were either going crazy, or suffering some kind of optical illusion. You don't notice this until you can see BOTH struts at the exact same time which you cannot physically do while standing on one side or the other. In other words, you won't even think about an optical illusion until you can see side-by-side the same general area under each wheel well, which is what the photos do for you.
I hope this is an optimal illusion because I cannot find a measurable (physical) imbalance anywhere in the rear of the vehicle no matter what I use as objective offsetting measuring points form the vehicle to the ground. It is perfectly balanced no matter how I measure things. So, this has got to be caused by shroud cuts that are dissimilar, right?
Please tell me that you see the same thing in your 2016-2018 CX-9.
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