My EPS has now failed for the third time. Not sure what repairs were made the on the first occasion about twelve months ago but the unit was replaced by the dealer on the second occasion about two months ago. On that occasion the failure had been intermittent

Pulled into a hand wash this morning with everything functioning properly. After hosing down the car (nothing under the bonnet) I started the car to leave - no power steering. Fuse was fine.

The dealer assures me that he has not had previous failures - let alone three in the same vehicle. Warranty expires April next year and I am not sure that I want the exposure of a replacement if it goes again. Has anyone had a similar experience. Is this a known problem?

 

Welcome to the forum.

Power steering failures are fairly uncommon. There is a known problem with the wiring harness to the electric power steering motor though. The problem will show up as no power steering and a B2278 code will be recorded. The dealer can confirm the code.

If this is the cause of your failure, then the dealer will have to solder a new piece of wiring into the harness.

Cheers,

Gomez.

 

Welcome to the forum and thanks for sharing the problem with us.

Keep us posted.

 

I suppose that at least i will know most of the potential problems before i purchase thanks to posts such as this one

Thanks for sharing and good luck with your car .

 

What you need to realise Dan is that people come on to post about problems and seek solutions. Very few post about a successful and uneventful trip to the supermarket. As a result, a casual observer could conclude that the RX-8 is a flooding, cat clogging, power steering failing headlight fogging bucket of puss.

The truth is many (like myself) have not had a single failure in their time of ownership. I've owned mine since Feb 04.

 

As the yanks would say: "Word!"

(I've gotta spend less time over there ).

 

Word

 

Word? What word??

 

 

I would suspect that they missed fixing the problem in the first instances....if it was the harness....replacing the EPS unit may have "fixed" the short by moving the wires...only to have it show up again later as the real problem

 

I find that hard to believe. My dealer always fixes everything correctly the first time.

<sarcasm dripping from every syllable>

 

Gomez,

Thanks for the tip. I will check this out with the dealer.

You have confirmed what I have so far been told - that power steering problems are rare; hopefully the cause of mine can be located.

I should have mentioned that, other than this problem, I am really happy with the car.

Some of you may be interested to hear that a South African friend of mine who collects Ferrraris drove it when on a visit last year and said that it handled better than any of his collection (which includes cars up to the mid 1980's one of which is a Boxer).

 

Per Gomez's post there is a "overlay" harness in the system to correct the steering issue. There are no official released posted on this site nor Mazdas.

The Dealer will have to call the AU Tech Line to get the harness.

 

Problem fixed. Unfortunately I was unable to get the car to the dealer before leaving for the Northern Territory for three weeks. Finally had it attended to last week. It seems that the last problem was caused by the failure of a controller unit. The dealer suggested that this may have been involved in the original failure that caused the replacement of the steering rack but no-one can be sure.

One interesting point was that there was no mention on Mazda's warranty system of the very first failure. This indicates that the dealer who fixed it at that time (not my usual servicing dealer) was able to do so without the need for the replacement of any components.

Thank you all for your interest. Hopefully Shamrock will see this.

 

Glad everything works out fine.

It is not being the first.... isn't it?