2013 Grand Touring

I have an unusual vibration at highway speeds. It's pretty bad, it makes the steering wheel, hood and both side mirrors shake. It can also be felt throughout the body of the vehicle. It starts at about 55 and continues to about 80. After 80 it goes away and before 55 it's not there.

Unfortunately I've had it in for service about this twice for this already. First try they balanced the tires 2 times. Once a standard balancing, second road force balancing. This was done at my local dealer...

Second time around at the dealer that I purchase the car from (about 35 miles away) they replaced one tire that they said was an oval essentially and re-balanced the rest of the tires. They also put a nice scrape on one of my wheels(which they repaired-I consider a repair bulls_it for a brand new car) This is when the car had 600 miles on it and the temp tag still on it. I will not bring it back to this dealer.

I still have the vibration however it is a little better, but I'm still not satisfied. Especially since my daily commute is mostly on the highway and this is a brand new car...

My last vehicle which I had for 5 years has been in the shop less than this has already. I really like this car otherwise.

Any suggestions or is anyone else having the same issue?

 

Welcome to the Mazda forum.

Have not experienced this in first 3 weeks of ownership. I assume you have 19" wheels with Toyo tires.

You mentioned many trips to shop, is it more than 2 and for what else? Consider trying another dealership.

 

No shake or excessive noise experienced, though we're on the Sport trim (manual) so we've got 17" Yokohama tires.

I would be irritated if they scratched a wheel during service regardless of how old the car was, to be honest. They should be taking good care of their customers' property.

Out of curiosity, do you experience this on every road surface, or just certain ones? I ask because there are pieces of highway I've driven on in the past that weren't super smooth, and I did get vibrations in the car I was driving at the time.

Barring a road surface interaction with the vehicle, I can't expect that the shake is "normal" . . .

 

Marked - status of your CX-5?

 

What is road force balancing?
Sounds more like a scam to me ...
Balancing a tire is adding weight to the lighter part of the tire, so the weight is distributed even along the tread.

 

It's just a better machine and technology to balance tires at speed and determine if something is wrong with wheel or tire. All the best tire and wheel shops have these machines, they work well. You can google Hunter road force balancing for more detail.

 

I too have the same problem as described by Marked. I have a Grand touring CX-5 AWD with less than 300 miles on it. It too has 19" wheels and Toyo tires. My vibration starts at ~65 and comes and goes through to 80. The dealer adjusted the tire pressures and of course this has made no difference. I am about to take it back for more investigation. On thing I have noticed is that the vibration is definitely worse from cold in the morning when the vehicle has been out side all night. It is much less noticeable in the evening when coming home.

 

GWESP1 - Interesting, possible flat-spotting when cold. Certainly sounds tire-related. Do you get steering wheel shake at those speeds (65-80mph)? If so they can rotate front to back and see if it goes away, indicating one of the 2 front tires is out of balance or bad.

This is not normal. My AWD has 1000 miles, smooth up to 80mph which is as fast as I've taken it so far.

 

We get nothing outside of the normal vibration you'd expect. (Object moving quickly across surface which is not pristine=some vibration/noise.) But my wife and I were discussing this and wondering if the people who are having more of an issue are used to driving something which is smoother/quieter.

You know, all things being a little bit relative, there's more or less noise/vibration across different cars. Not that we don't think there's the (quite strong) possibility that there is something going wrong, just that we were kind of brainstorming for other things which might contribute to this experience. Past driving experiences would be one of these things, certainly.

Keep us posted on how your issue "shakes" out.

 

^ You bring up a good point, but I think a couple of posters do have a legit concern. Hopefully they will get to root cause, balance and/or tire issue. Marked already already stated one defective tire was replaced, makes me wonder if another is marginal too.

It's unlikely they own a LS460 or S550 for direct comparison which would certainly be smoother. I regularly drive 2 sport sedans and the CX-5 compares very well to both in terms of ride smoothness (not power or engine refinement but they are premium V6's).