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- Protege5 2003
BlkZoomZoom said:
Absolutely, things break. No question. Engineers can't think of everything and sometimes, try as they might, the design has some flaw. I used to have a manual ' 65 corvair which would flex its clutch cable back and forth with each gear shift. The design of the clutch pedal connection to the cable was pretty bad. After 10k miles or so the cable would snap off at the top of the clutch pedal lever. That problem annoyed untold thousands of corvair owners but as far as I recall nobody ever sued GM over it. That's because it was a minor annoyance - if the cable broke you had to speed shift home, or more likely, get towed, but the repair wasn't very expensive and there was no permanent damage.
At the other end of the spectrum there are life threatening failures. You know the ones: cars burst into flames, wheels fall off, brakes fail. Those end up in recalls.
The screws fall in the middle ground. They aren't going to kill anybody but they are costing P5 owners some serious money if they are unlucky enough to have the screws fall out after the warranty expires. The galling part is that any first year autoshop student could tell you that no part of the intake manifold should be capable of coming loose and being sucked into the motor. So if a company like Mazda is going to sell a car where bits of the intake manifold do, in fact, come loose, and then break various expensive parts downstream, then they really should step up and deal with the problem. Customers expect a minimal level of engineering and assembly competence from a company like Mazda, so as you can see in this thread, they get more than a little pissed when a boneheaded design results in a thousand dollar repair bill.
