As of today I was a happy owner of a new red RX8. My car is about a week old and a fully loaded 6sp.

The first day I drove the car home I was putting through traffic and when I shifted into 3rd gear from about 20mph the rear tires had locked up and the engine killed. At the time thought nothing of it.

Today I was cruising down a hwy at about 50-55 mph and I shifted into 5th gear and the rear tires locked up the same way and the rear of the car spun out of control causing me to slam into the median and bouncing into a concrete light pole then into oncoming traffic. I'm very fortunate to be here typing this. I have a child on the way in November and this could have been horrific. No one else was hit or involved. However the car is damaged really bad and don't know if they are going to total it or not.

I'm gonna send it to Mazda first to see if they can diagnose the problem.

I really need you guys to let me know if you have had any problems with this or anything related to this. Because I'm positive that this is a serious problem that I want Mazda to take responsibility for.

I will post some pics tomorrow.

Thanks,
Rob

 

Holy cow. It's good to know you're okay. I wonder why the rear tires would lock so suddenly. That cannot be right. Mazda will most definitely be held accountable.

 

What is your VIN#

 

DSC on or off?

 

If it was computer controlled in any way, the PCM will have the details.

 

Rob. really happy you are ok. i am sure this is not the problem but
is there any chance you shifted into 3rd by mistake with really low revs? just asking because i missed 4th the other day (from 5th) and went into 2nd and the wheels locked up for a second. scared the **** out of me. just checking. glad you are ok.

 

Glad to see your ok.

 

Hey man...glad to hear youre ok.

Any witnesses? Blow-out? I could see something like this happening with an AT tranny...but a 6?

Hope it all works out for you.

- Irish

 

rear diff. lock-up = very dangerous
HMMM
I just saw Fight Club

 

wow. That's some scary crap right there. Glad your ok. That is wierd though, hopefully Mazda can figure out what was going on with that

good luck

 

DSC was on and I was going about 50-55mph so the RPM were not low enough to kill the engine going from 4th gear to 5th. I had witnesses that saw what happened and gave a police report. Yes, I have heard the PCM can store everything that happened and I'm hoping that they can figure what caused this.

Nemesis8 why do you need my VIN#?

 

Sounds like some type of transmission problem to me.

Scarier than crap! Glad you are ok!

 

glad you're ok guy.

one week experience with the car...
you didn't say if you were upshifting or downshifting
rear wheels locked up on a shift to 5th
rear wheels locked up on a shift to 3rd
sounds like you shifted into 1st
maybe operator error - the shift gates on the 8 are really narrow and easy to find the wrong gate until you get the feel of the shifter
maybe mechanical problem with the linkage

 

They will pull the black box and tell you every thing that went wrong. Yes please post some pics for us.

 

I did a similar thing about a week after i go my car. I was driving down the highway and a V-6 mustang got kinda froggy. i wont go into the details becuase of the forum rules but i was in sixth and meant to got to 4th but went into second. The back tires locked up at about 80 MPH, somehow i kept the car on the road but felt really bad after the fact. I was wondering if there are any detrimental effects of doing this to the car?

 

I can't believe the shifter would even let you go into that much lower a gear at those speeds. As for rear wheels locking up, does the computer sense the significantly wrong gearing and apply the rear brakes to protect the engine/trans? If it didn't then the revs would go wildly over redline which would blow the engine and/or trans bigtime.

I don't know...this sounds like either an operator error, or a very rare issue with a specific car. This is the first I've heard of anything like this with an 8. I've owned mine for over a year and have over 19,000 miles on it and it's never behaved anything near like this. I've driven it "briskly" shall we say...."performance" shifted, hot/cold weather, 2 runs to Vegas in 100+ heat, wet/dry weather conditions.....at no time has the car done anything but perform superbly. It even saved my life on Christmas eve last year during a bad traffic moment at night in the rain.

I don't think this is a common problem, a "Mazda" problem or anything but possibly a very rare issue with your car, or you yourself being a new owner mistakenly mis-shifted.

I've VERY glad to hear you're okay and I look forward to you posting what Mazda learns about this situation.

 

The picsof the car and the accident scene can be found here.

www.pictures.southernitsolutions.net

They are named RX the number and so on.

 

Tried to access your photos; they come up as a long page of gibberish text with the words "Sony Disc" visible in several spots. Are these native Sony camera files? They should be in jpeg mode for us to be able to view them.

 

What is also disturbing is that the front airbag did not deploy and the front suffered a big impact.

 

This sounds like exactly what happened to me when i went from 5th to second (instead of 4th). It let me go in pretty easily (suprising) and the wheels locked up for a second (probably sparing my engine). scary....

 

I'd sue Mazda if I was you.

-Rupes

 

hard to believe.. he writes he was driving @ 50-55 mph and shifted into 5th.
If he was in 4th (sounds reasonable) and shifts up, at worst he would've gone into 3rd gear instead of 5th. I mean, going from 4th to 5th means you intend to move the stick to the RIGHT, I can see that you miss the move to the right and end up in 3rd but to 1st (the left!) ???

If he had been downshifting from 6th to 5th, again, one could make a mistake and pull to the left unintended and end up in 3rd.. but not in 1st.

55 mph can be handled perfectly well in any gear from 3rd to 6th, I believe even in 2nd gear.

My bet is that he shifted properly and something else was wrong and the computer log will prove it.

-Peter

 

I have been trying to keep track of manual tranny problems, and trying to see if it is related to VIN number sequencing. I have a local member that lost his tranny twice now. It's not a big request, just one for my own curiousity. Glad to hear you are OK.

 

if you download his photos to your desktop, then rename it to .jpg, you should be able to view them.

 

Very odd, it worked fine on WinXP without renaming.