MPG Issues
The gas mileage is directly related to engine maintenance conditions, ambient weather conditions, and right foot conditions!
I've seen 31-33 mpg on the highway by keeping my foot out of it, and I've seen 10mpg on the city when in "GO!" mode. This is the very nature of a turbo car. Power when you want it, but you must PAY TO PLAY. keep your foot out of it, and you'll find yourself averaging 23-25mpg easy.
The suspension clunk is just crappy though. I don't think its happened to me, but during my next dealer visit it will be mentioned for checking.
To add to your list:
- Strange squeak coming from a currently unknown area in the engine bay. Only detectable during engine shutdown when warm, or when tooling around at near 0mph. This squeak is pissing a lot of people off, including us.
- Occasionally your engine will fall out! Haha! J/K of course except for those it has already happened to. Mine did it at 6200 miles or so. That comes from a weak Transmission mount, and should be checked ASAP if you've got an 07 car. If you are modifying your car with new mounts like the TRZ or AWR, you probably need to check this mount point personally quite often. It has been recognized as a loosening point, potentially disastrous at that.
- Brake rotors tend to warp all to easily. It happened to me at 11,200 miles and seems to be a recurring problem to others. Unsure of what causes it, but it is annoying. The brake pads themselves seem perfectly capable of regular to hard duty, and the car stops better then most WORLD CLASS cars.
- The stock head unit on the non Bose models doesn't easily integrate properly to aftermarket audio equipment. This is because the stock head unit has a frequency attenuation (roll-off) on its outputs, and this greatly affects the sound quality of aftermarket amps, speakers, etc. The rear outputs are 10X worse then the fronts, but the fronts still aren't exactly flat. The rolloff looks like a plateau, with a steep drop-off on the low end, and the high end, especially the rear speakers. The fix for this is to first run a tap to only the front outputs, leaving the rears to rot (since most good sound systems don't need them), and to run some sort of compensator, processor, EQ, etc. That will bring everything back in line!
- The paint flat out sucks. Big time. It is quick to chip and show primer or worse. A Mazda feature, I've noticed.
- Turbo seal failure. I've not had this one happen to me, but its common. Typically noticeable immediately after installing a Turbo-Back exhaust upgrade.
That's all I can think of for now. I love my car, and I wouldn't trade it for another unless it was of a car that was 3x the cost. That's how good it really is. But still, s*** goes wrong on it like all other cars!
