Mazda MPV 1998Change

We bought this van used, and drove for several years, eventually giving it up when repairs became too costly.

The MPV was a good minivan for people who had minvans. The shorter wheel base made MPVs drive (and park) more like a car than a van. Drivers enjoy great visibility and few blind spots due to large, well-placed windows.

Now that we have owned several Mazda vehicles, we have noticed a couple of patterns in things that go wrong:

Power windows slow down and/or become unresponsive in cold weather. This is really not acceptable for Canadian weather. More than once a simple drive-thu pickup at Tim Hortons turned into a cold drive to the garage, or a half hour of waiting for the van to heat up enough for the window to work. We noticed this first on this MPV (1998), and again on the next MPV we purchased (2006).

We had similar problems with power locks on this van. When the temperature was at or below freezing, the doors would not unlock (or would relock after a few moments). Key was required sometimes to get in.

To be fair, the van usually started in very cold weather, so we could have been dealing with much worse problems than these.

And speaking of annoyances, the interior trim, especially door panels, did not fit tightly on this van, and/or became loose over time, so there was always one or more rattling noises that were hard to track down.

All in all, it was a good vehicle until the end, when expensive repairs began to pile up. It had 126k when we bought it, and we drove it to well past 200k.