Hi everyone,

I live in Hong Kong and have been driving an used 2004 1500cc M/T Mazda 3 for the past 15 months. The car was running great until two weeks ago. Hope some of the board members can help in identifying the problems.

I recently (as of two weeks ago) changed the original factory light bulb to an after-market one after the left one burnt out. I've been having problems ever since both bulbs were replaced. The technician (not from Mazda) took something apart during the process, which I later realized was the air-intake. I checked and everything seeems to be in place. Frankly, I don't know what went wrong.

Problem 1 - Specifically (when the engine is off), the dash board light (the orange ones that illuminate the entire dash board panel) would turn itself on automatically and goes on and off at a very fast pace (while the Auto light function is off). The sound (as though it reminds you that you have your key in the ignition) would also go off. The solution I discovered is to turn the Fog Light on for a bit and the blinking of the back panel light would go away. This happens once in a while which is quite annonying.

Problem 2 - the car just loss all power and died on me while it was in motion (luckily I was going about 15mph) and managed to stop the car w/ some hard braking.

I've been driving M/T for the past 20 years and have never experienced any problems such as this. Anyone out there who had similar problems before? Any solutions or leads I can pursue to identify the problems?

Thanks in advance for your help.

 

wow, im sure someone here can help with some of this but im new to mazdas, the problems your having are freaky. I do know that some electrical problems can be solved with disconnecting the battery for a few minutes, kinda like rebooting a pc.

 

Thanks for your response and reading. The issue is taken care of once I replaced the after-market light bulbs with the original ones. Weird but I suspect the after-market goods may not be entirely compatible with the original wires? Who knows?