My CEL came on a week ago, so I finally took the 8 in for service, and they told me I have a bad O2 sensor. Long story short, it will cost me $360 parts and labor to fix. This really sucks because my warranty ran out last Oct. (I have an 04).

Here's a little horror story of my post-warranty status.

4 days after the warranty my car threw a fit, ABS stobbed working, and lost power steering. Turned out some sort of power harness was "torn up" and cost me about $500 to fix. This is after I complained that this happened right after my warranty is up, so they said mazda would pay for the part and I had to pay for the service. that's crap, but thats the way it goes I guess.

Then back in april or so, my CEL kicks on, ABS stops working, Power steering goes off line, and i lose my ASR. I have no idea whats going on so I make an appointment to get it checked. Talking to the service rep on the phone, she thought maybe it was the alternator, so I took it to autozone to get checked out. Turned out, my batter had a low charge, and but the Alternator tested as good. I am fine with this, so decide to just charge my battery or what not. The next day, i ended up losing power to everything, and my car died on the highway. Had it towed to the dealership. Turned out to be a bad alternator. That cost me another $500 in parts and labor.

So in short, after less than a year of running out of warranty I have paid around $1300+ in service issues. I was kind of upset so I went to Carmax to get an appraisal, and to top it all off, value is $10500. They said car is in great condition, just demand is down.

So in short, I am back in love with this car, cause there is no way in hell I am going to sell it for that little, no matter how little the value is. I just pray that I dont have any more "issues".

:(

Dam that sucks man. Hope your dont have any more issues man. I know how it is with the stealerships.
Hang in there :)

don't know if your a handy kind of person. but i just replaced my O2 sensor for $115. and I'm sure you could have replaced your alternator for less yourself. Wiring harness might have been a lot of work to do. but hey just the alternator and O2 sensor your talking about 500 bucks worth of savings and a couple of hours on a Saturday. The O2 sensor literally takes 5 minutes. With the DIY help on this website and the right tools you can you do almost anything yourself

O2 sensor isn't covered under the Emissions Warrenty?

Nope.

As bsteimel said, the O2 sensor simply screws in and they are under $100 if you look. All you need is a big crescent wrench.

>.< This site is always helpful, but I have finally come to the conclusion I do not have enough know how to mess around with my car. I have a hard enough time trying to get stuff done around the house, i'd probably make my car inoperable. Hopefully whenever I have more time off, I can try more DIY, but they seem to take me so much longer that I hope.

Thanks for the responses though.