So, I've got a 2006 Mazda 6s with the V6 and 5-speed manual...

1. At 1200 miles the idle started to jump up and down uncontrollably and the engine light came on. Shutting the engine off and starting it again cleared up the jumping idle problem but the check engine light stayed on for a few days. Eventually it went off. The problem recurred, same pattern, a few miles later.

Took to dealer... they replaced the throttle body in its entirety. Took the car home... Worked fine for a few hundred miles and the problem started up AGAIN! Happened 3 times. Took it back... This time they said they may have forgotten to disconnect/reconnect the battery the last time around, which causes some sort of EMS reboot so that the car can "recognize" the new throttle body. (Kinda like how you'd need to restart your PC to recognize a new piece of peripheral hardware --before the advent of "plug&play"). Car was fine for another 1500 miles or so... But it happened again, just once, very recently.

Is ANYONE else having this problem?

2. The driver's seat has an inflatable lumbar support and I have a bad back so I have it almost maxed out but not quite. At 900 miles, it burst and went flat. I am not a heavy person or anything. Got it replaced (and it took 2 months to get that part delivered). A month and a half later, it burst again. It's almost not worth bothering. All they'll do is replace it again with what is proven to be a substandard, low-quality device that will just break again under normal use.

Curious if anyone else is having this problem as well...?

Thank you all!

 

holy crap sounds like your Mazda6 likes to break/wear out parts. Seriously though that sucks and I'm sorry you're so unfortunate good luck iwht all of that.

 

Now thats new, but not uncommon but you would expect that with todays cars on the off chace it does happen it shouldnt happen anytime soon, my dad had the same problem with his old firebird he and his brother has bought the same exact car on the same day same color, tranny year...EVERTHING, except my dads brother had no problems and lived its life but my das car on the other hand broke down with somethin diff, in one week he basically had a brand new car. You get one of those and you think the world is against you. But anyway as long as it was under warrenty i wouldnt have a problem just havin them replace it but then im not as busy as you are, my suggestion is to either go another dealership and have them replace broken parts or start investing in some aftermarket parts, racing seats are very comfortable

 

38000 miles on my wife's Mazda6 and 28,000 on my Mazda3 and not a problem

 

Don't know about the broken lumbar, but I had the same thing happen to my '05. I had to take it in twice about the idel jumping and the car stalling. It ended up being a damaged evaporative emissions pump. The dealer said it was a problem Mazda has been having. In the earlier models, they were having a porblem with the throttle bodies as well. Since then, the car has been working great and I haven't had any problems.

 

Well now that's interesting. I'll be sure to mention the pump issue as something they ought to look at. Thanks!!!

For two lumbar supports to pop in a row, and for no one to seem to have this problem, I'm betting it's not the lumbar itself, but that there's a manufacturing defect inside the seat that's pinching or pressing against the thing, and after long enough it finally wears its way through. I'm going to ask them to replace the whole dang seat this time.

 

My drivers seat has the same issue...

 

I decided to go inside the seat myself and see what the scoop is!

It is not an inflatable bladder, but rather a cable-actuated mechanism. The hand crank spools up a cable, pulling on it much in the same manner that a bicycle brake lever does. The cable is surrounded by a plastic sheath, comes around from under and up to the right of where the lumbar "device" is... the end of the sheath is a hard plastic cap that "mounts" on the right side of this very cheaply-made plastic contraption inside the seat. From the cap, the exposed cable continues run along the width of this device, hooked in several times along the way to the other side where it is tied in.

The contraption itself is a series of vertical ribs attached in accordion-like fashion... When you tighten the cable, it pulls the ribs together. It's shaped so that when they're pulled together, they push forward into the lumbar area of the seat.

That's it! So why does it break? Because the cap of the sheath, where the cable first mounts to the device, is simply "snapped" in. No differrent than how you would store drill bits in a case... you snap the bits into their place, but you can easily pull them out. Same here... a couple of cheap little plastic tabs holds the cable housing cap under pressure, but it can easily be snapped right out. Very bad idea. So sure enough, if you max it out, it's under max pressure, regardless of your weight, and is prone to just popping out of its mount. When it does, the cable of course loses all its tension and the device goes to its fully-relaxed position and cannot be adjusted.

So, you can have the dealer keep replacing this piece of junk or you can do what I'm going to try, is to get in there with some heavy-duty epoxy and permanently seal it into place. Not very easy, though... We'll see...

 

Wow, that's the first thumbs down I give to Mazda. Well now you can fix it yourself when it messes up. I say fab asmall bracket (1/8th inch thick sheet of metal and 2 screws) to keep it from popping out. Good luck, and that is a terrible design flaw, although I liek the metal rib acordian thing, that's preyy inivative.

 

I have heard a lot about the broken lumbar problem...