Goodbye Mazda

[drivenyam]

Sorry to hear about the car, man. I sure hope I never have to experience this issue.

 

[Wishmaster]

Please don't take this as insensitive, but how did your brother know that the power steering stopped working on a straight highway? And how does he explain how it yanked the steering wheel out of his hands? With the design of the rack & pinion, there is always a mechanical connection to the wheels, and the hydraulic power steering system only assists to lessen the effort involved when making a turn.

We, like others, have had the power steering pump failure problem, but I'm at a loss to understand how a pump moving fluid through the system could possible override driver control?

Like someone mentioned just below your comment... it's probably more of a case where when the pump failed, he noticed and it became very difficult to steer, he was then probably trying to change lanes and had to give it a fair bit of force to turn the wheel, pump then kicks back on and all of a sudden that force he was applying was enough to turn the wheel most of the way very quickly = loss of control... just like driving down the highway at speed, then yanking the wheel one way as hard as you can.

I know when my pump went, I couldn't believe how hard it was to turn the wheel, during slow city driving to get it home I almost couldn't get it around some of the slow corners! At highway speeds you don't need nearly as much force to just go around a bend or change lanes... but it's still SIGNIFICANTLY more than you need with power. So I can imagine the force he was using even to just turn the wheel a little. I grew up driving small cars with standard steering and so was (so I thought) used to handling cars without power steering and remember it still being an option on some new lower end models. But obviously cars these days with power steering are not engineered to be easily controllable without it.

How did he know? Oh you'll know... even those little adjustments you make with the twitch of your finger as you're driving down the highway are impossible and it requires two hands giving constant effort always pushing against the tram-lining, bumps and imperfections on the highway. He could have even just been pushing against one of the highway ruts and when the power kicked back on he would have launched himself into the guardrail.

 

[Secondtyme]

There is a big difference between a car with manual steering and a power steering car whose system has failed. The steering ratio can be vastly different on a car with power steering. What I'm trying to remember is if the 5 has a variable ratio rack in it or not. Just think of the problems that will be popping up in twenty years when ALL cars will be "steer by wire" and no one has ever driven a car with a manual rack before.....