Hi,
I am new to this forum and i have found it very interesting reading all the threads. I have a Maxda 5 Sport(143) registered January 2007(56 plate)and i have had three sets of front tyres in the past 24 months. The front tyres were wearing on the inside edge leaving the middle of the tyre with plenty of tread. The previous tyres were Bridgestone Potenza and i have now changed to Continental Contact Sport 3 as suggested by Kwik Fit. The tyres feel different to the Bridgestone when i drive the car. Can anyone suggest how i start to tackle Mazda about the problem because i get the feeling from a phone call today(08/01/10)they are not interested?

 

I think this was the pressure they were at when my first lot needed replacing at 8000 miles. Since then I've kept the new dunlops at 35 psi (owners manual recommends 33 psi for light load, 35 for full load), have done 4000 miles and not noticed any abnormal wear yet.

Why on earth are mazda garages setting the pressures to 28psi? It's not surprising so many people are getting problems if this is what they are doing

 

Hello All.

Over the past week my blood pressure finally reached boiling point today.

Like many of you we have experienced problems with our Mazda 5 Sport which we had from new in early 2007.

Today I reached breaking point. Like many of you we have had problems with excessive tyre wear which to date we have had a full set of tyres replaced by mazda on one occasion and a new front set on another.

I have to admit I am a serving police officer and the attitude of the Mazda customer service and the dealership has been disgusting.

Like many of you who have remained silent, we have replaced tyres, but recently we had a puncture on our rear drivers side tyre. (Nail in it) On inspection of the tyre, right on the inside and even partially up the side wall the tyre had worn excessively. The main tyre tread was excellent with most probably a good 15000 miles + in tread left. We then inspected the other rear nearside tyre and again found excessive tyre wear on the inside.

Like most of you we have been back to the dealership and the wheel alignments and cambers etc were all supposedly found to be in tolerance.
The dealership cheekily informed me that it must be down to tyre pressures and under inflation!!! The car before going into the dealership had its tyre pressures checked by myself. I ensured that I had put 40psi in the rear however the dealership tried to claim that there was only 20 psi in the rear of both tyres!!!! I thought to myself I may as well give up as a police officer then because I obviously can't pump up a tyre correctly. If it was 20 psi it would be visually flat and I can assure you all they were fine.

Anyway, sorry to waffle on but today my car was handed back to me having been told that there is nothing wrong with the wheel alignment and that Mazdas stance was that it was down to tyre pressure. I was incensed as I had not collected the car myself as my wife had popped to get it and was then fobbed off in the typical Mazda way by the rude owner of a well established dealership.
She was in tears.

Anyway I have had colleagues look at the tyres and I am hopefully going to get the car looked at by VOSA to see what they think. If I have any news I will let you all know. To those of you that are members of which I would be very interested to see what there stance is and what they unearth. To cap it all though having had my car in for an interim service it was only the mechanic (who is a nice person) that mentioned to my wife that our rear shocks had gone. In the last week we had noticed increased noise etc, but the owner of the company didn't even mention it and said 'give me a ring if you hear any clonking noises'

I have been contacted by Mazda Customer service and their attitude absolutely sucked!! Having now looked on the internet is is in a sad way it somewhat makes me feel better when i now know that we are not alone. I was made to feel today that it was my fault and that's not a nice feeling.

 

20 psi may not be visibly flat. I've had to pump the tires back up on my Mazda5 several times and they were down to 20 psi. I could not tell they were down so low.

I'm not trying to say you are not checking you tires often, but maybe we should all be checking them weekly or so to eliminate their claims.

I've just replaced my first set at 33K miles. The factory tires were noticibly worn on the inside at 26K miles so I rotated them for the first time then. I kept running them to get the most out of them but the front discs were getting warped and the whole front was shuddering so bad. I had to surface them, so I got new tires then. I'm trying the Yokohama S-drive as I have them on another car of mine. It's a summer tire and pretty soft, so I don't expect high miles from them, but if the uneven wear is there, it should show up soon.

I think I might check the pressures weekly and rotate at every oil change to get the maximum out of them.

 

Having spent a little time reading owners comments in a number of forums it appears to me that there Mazda have buried their heads in the sand with the tyre wear issue.
I don't know if anyone has had an official engineers report carried out or can provide me with links to documents which could aid my quest to challenge Mazda.
We are due to change the car in May this year, but before then I at least want to try and do something about this problem.

 

Hey all, we've only done 3k miles on our dealer supplied Avon tyres in our 56 Plate 07 Sport, and i can't notice any real degredation yet. I am keeping an eye on the pressures every other week.

I took the 5 for service last week and the dealer told me that a rear shock was leaking so would replace it under warranty. The other rear had already been done according to the history.

The Service Manager told me that one potential cause of uneven inside-shoulder tyre wear is a lazy shock/strut (can't remember the precise term) which doesn't return the wheel to normal angle. I'm guessing the shock works in an up-and-down alignment, not a sideways fashion which might help adjust the camber of the wheel?

They recommend i get the leaking part replaced urgently anyway.

I attach some pictures showing wierd looking weights mid rear-axle, and the current status of one of my rear tyres.

Thanks

 

I think I'd notice the tyre at 20psi too, at 28psi I could see the tyre wall was bowing between the ground the and rim. You'd certainly feel the difference in heavier steering too I think.

What I'm getting from this thread is that the best solution is to take it to an alignment specialist, but I don't want to pay out for this until I've got compensation for new tyres from Mazda.

The other morning I had a close look at the inside edge of my front tyre after running it for 4000 miles at 35psi, and could not see any obvious excessive wear, but I'd like to know if there is a more scientific method to use to monitor it.

One thing I tried was getting my head right down on the ground and seeing if the wearing edge of the tyre was actually in contact with the ground, it did not seem to be, but I guess things may be different when the wheels are rolling, and certainly when cornering.

 

Hi. I'd thought I'd post my tyre wear experiences on here for other people having issues.

I have owned my Mazda 5 2.0 Petrol since new June 2008 and have also experienced some very unusual tyre wear. After 13,000 miles I have needed 2 new tyres fitted to the front, although this doesn't seem bad compared to what others have reported. The drivers side tyre was completely worn out on the outside edge (about a 2cm band) and the passenger side was completely worn on both the inside and outside edges. I know that the passenger wear i've had is usually caused by under inflation but I have always maintained pressures at between 33-35 psi so this is very strange to me. My rear tyres are in better shape with only the drivers side just beginning to show unusual wear on the inside edge. For information, I have not rotated the tyres.

I took the car this morning to Newport Mazda for them to carry out a four wheel alignment and I have attached the results. What concerns me is that the alignment data is shown for the model 2005 onwards. Now it was my understanding that the alignment was altered for the 2008 model so I am not convinced that the dealer has used the correct data for the alignment. In fact they are completely different to the values posted by wrxseeker in post #511. I will give it a few thousand miles I guess and see what developes.

 

The following may be of help.

The alignment figures shown on post #511 were actually for my car. (wrxseeker kindly put them into a more readable format).
My car is a 2008 2.0D Sport. The alignment sheet showed the vehicle as "5 SPORT UPGRADE (2005 - ----)".

I agree the nominal values do look quite a bit different to yours. Whether it is all down to the difference between the Sport and Non Sport models I cannot say.

 

Rhodri, thanks for the info. I did a slight typo in my orginal post and perhaps I should clarify that I have a Mazda 5 2.0 Petrol Sport. I'm still a bit concerned about my nominal values as I would expect them to be the same as yours, also my alignment sheet makes no reference to it being the sport model?! Unfortunately, I'm no expert in interpreting the alignment data but to me its appears that my TOE readings are in mm whereas your readings are in degress/minutes. Perhaps this could explain the difference, maybe someone here will be able to clarify.

On a side note, it was a bit of challenge finding a local dealer to do the four wheel alignment. Both King David Tyres (Risca) and Discount Tyres (Cwmbran) said that they could do the alignment, but then didn't have any Mazda 5 alignment data when I got there, both said they awaiting software updates for their equipment.