Hello all, I am new to this forum. I have a 2003 Protege 5, 5-speed, ~60k miles (mostly city but not in heavy traffic) and I don't know much about engines but I do know how my car usually drives.

The other day, I was in "stop-and-go" traffic for ~30 minutes and noticed that the engine was revving a lot more than usual in order to move during the "go." I also noticed a burning smell. No engine lights came on. I got off the highway and tried to make it home on surface streets but rush hour had begun and after another 15 minutes, the car would barely move. I could shift into gear, the engine would rev, but the car would Barely creep forward. I left it in a parking lot overnight and had it towed to the dealer then next morning. (For various reasons, it wasn't possible to take it to the dealer that night).

Two days and several phone calls later, all I could get out of the dealer was that the clutch must have overheated but "the car seems fine now." I don't think a techinician actually looked at the clutch, someone just drove the car. I eventually went over there and drove it home myself, and yes, the car does drive but the clutch is NOT its usual self.

So here's my thing: I've been in stop-and-go for longer than 30 minutes before, and this is the first time the clutch overheated, if that's what happened. I'm disconcerted by the dealer's apparent dismissal of my concerns (I had the car towed in!); I expected that someone would at least take a look at the clutch, even if the car seemed to be driving okay.

Is my clutch on the way out? The last manual transmission that I owned was a 1986 Tercel that made it to 100k+ miles on one clutch before I sold it, so I've never had a clutch die on me before. Is overheating a symptom?

 

With normal driving habits your clutch should last longer than 60k. It sounds to me that your clutch over heated. Riding the clutch during stop and go traffic will cause it to slip and have that burning clutch smell. I would take the car to another shop or dealer and get a second opinion. Depending on how bad your clutch over heated you might need to have it replaced, that can be costly.

 

Is your clutch on the way out? -Yes. Is overheating a symptom? -Yes.
Is it recoverable?- Only partially. Will it get worse? -You can bet on it.

What you experienced is called clutch slip; the symptoms are a speedometer response which lags sluggishly behind the tachometer response to increased accelerator input, accompanied a short time later by the smell of something hot.
Light, short pedal travel distance controls are an attractive selling point. Sadly they are also limiting factors on how long a clutch will endure, since they come with a penalty in a reduction of the force available from the clutch springs to couple the engine output to the gearbox input. The heat created by slip polishes both the clutch lining material and the driven plate, and while a cool down will result in a partial recovery, unless it was just a one-time only episode, the deterioration will accelerate over time.
There is little you can do to avoid this, but a little graphite or molybdenum based spray into the slave cylinder linkage where it enters the gearbox, and graphite spray on all the pedal pivots and linkages to the master cylinder (in the cab up under the dash) will ensure that those feeble springs on the clutch plate will couple the clutch without the additional burden of having to cope with any avoidable linkage friction.
Or you can of course have a heavy duty or competition clutch installed (heavier springs, higher pedal pressure, virtually indestructible in normal driving), or learn how to do clutch-free gear shifts. On my '99 Protege for example, the gear ratios between 4th and 3rd and 3rd and 2nd are both happily 1.5: 1, and the gearbox has a good synchromesh.
I use 2000 and 3000 rpm as my reference points: for upshifting, I accelerate to 3000 rpm, pull the stick to neutral, drop the tach to 2000, then shove the stick into the higher gear. Downshifts, just the opposite: at 2000 rpm go to neutral, blip the gas to 3000, and push the stick into the lower gear. No clutch, no crunch involved!
I've had Camrys, a Corolla, and the Protege, and I've budgeted for clutch swapout every 150K kilometers ( 100K miles) for them all, because my family does most of the in-traffic driving using conventional shifting, stubbornly refusing to even try the clutchless shift.
For the record, I think that from about 2002 onwards, Mazda clutches (or else Mazda drivers using this forum) have gotten worse.

 

Wow !
Go job oldeng with the info.
Wed of this week Im doing my Clutch. (In the drive way) LOL.
The pedel is really geting low.

 

Thanks for all the info, oldeng and vlstellato. Looks like I am in for a new clutch, then. Still, it's cheaper than a new car...I am intrigued by the clutchless shift - may have to give that a try. Thanks again for the thorough response!