Hi
I would appreciate some advice. I have had my Mazda 6 2.0D estate since 15,000 miles and I have now done 87,000 miles. I've never had any problem with the car and the DPF has only needed regenerating once in this time. The car rarely does town trips and does at least 20 minutes down a motorway twice a day and often does longer trips.
However, at the beginning of the year it had it's 75,000 mile service by a Mazda dealer. Since that time the DPf light (solid) has come on regularly but weirdly only at the end of a trip down a motorway for more than half an hour. Previous to this I have never had the DPF light come on solidly, so at first I thought that maybe they had corrected something previously not right. Although it did seem odd that it did it at the end of a long journey and then turned itself off next time I started the car!
Anyway 3 weeks ago after a 40 minute trip down a motorway the light started flashing. The oil was OK although it was a little bit above the F. I took the car back to the mazda dealer and explained what had happened. They of course denied liability and tried to accuse me of not driving it correctly. But they did sort out the light (and told me it had been regenerated) but didn't charge me.
The very next day after a 20 minute motorway journey, a day in the car park, then a 5 minute trip and the light came on. Turned the engine off and the light was off when I turned it on 10 minutes later. Since then it has done motorway journeys every weekday and 60 mile plus motorway trips at weekends. Once a week at the end of the long journey the light has come on again. Today after driving 90 miles yesterday on a high speed motorway trip and then back to day the DPF light came on after 60 miles and then started flashing. The oil level had risen but was not on X so the RAC advised it was ok to drive. After another 15 miles the engine light came on and the anti skid light. The oil was not much higher, still below X. I have abandoned the car ready to take to the garage.
By the way the diesel in the car was Shell high performance.
Mazda suggested that the catalytic converter may need replacing and quoted close to £1000 to fix, which seems amazing given that it has only recently had a major service, which I would have through should include this if a likely problem.
When the car was serviced at the beginning of the year, the service engineer commented that it was a very clean engine.
Is it likely that the catalytic converter would fail so quickly, as there doesn't seem to have been any slow decline.
If anyone has any advice on what this might be, I would appreciate it.

Also does anyone know if I can pay an independant engineer to oversee the works to the car if I do agree to get Mazda to replace the cat. I'm not convinced it is this but have no way of telling, as they are unlikely to admit it isn't once they start work.

 

Your approaching or are at the end of the DPFs life, Mazda DPFs last about 80k-120k miles from literature I have read. If anyone knows different please don't hesitate to mention something. VW DPFs fail around 120k same with BMWs but there are low and high ranges to these averages, 80k seems to be the low end and 140ish seems to be high end.