The car has since been sold, and I bought a new one, I just wanna go on record and verify the other person that complained about the 2008 Mazda5 transmission.

I bought mine at 75,000 miles and paid $8000 cash for it. At about 125,000 miles the tranny completely gave out. After having the vehicle for a little over a year, I sold it for $300 and did not fix the transmission. I was quoted $3000 for a transmission replacement. The Mazda6 I had before it, was amazing, this Mazda5 completely sucked and was a complete rip off.

Automatic transmission would momentarily lockup at speeds above 30mph. When the lock up occurs, there would be absolutely no warning and the vehicle would nose dive and the passengers would all eat the dash like a momentary hard braking condition then suddenly let up, all within a millisecond. It was so sudden it would scare the crud out of everyone. The issue would happen once a month and progressively get worse over time so the dealer had a difficult time. Local dealer had no clue, changed the transmission mount which was damaged by the sudden lockup but that was only a symptom. On a long trip this happened at freeway speed and we left the vehicle with a different dealer and got a rental. The dealer changed the transmission control module and I have put thousands of miles on the vehicle since with no further issues.

We owned a previous Mazda model, their MPV minivan, on which we had an a/c system fail which Mazda somewhat reluctantly offered half payment to install an entire new a/c system, compressor, condensor, and all. So we were out about $650 for that and it left a bit of a bad taste.

Nevertheless, we purchased a newer two-year old Mazda 5 bought used with about 20,000 miles on it. It was generally a good vehicle though not very peppy to drive. At least it was until the automatic transmission completely failed at 140,000 miles. Admittedly, that's a lot of miles, but I've driven many cars well past that point and never had a single transmission fail on me. It cost us over $4000 to have a newly rebuilt transmission installed -- by our Mazda dealership -- and this time, of course, Mazda did not "participate" in paying for it.

Even more, that rebuilt transmission then began to leak transmission fluid. We took it back to Mazda a few months after they'd installed it and tried to get them to fix the leak. That took about a month (their transmission specialist was not available for a week, then they couldn't locate the leak, etc.). Finally they agreed to put a second rebuilt transmission in our car. That one seemed to work fine -- but by then we were so disillusioned by Mazda that we traded the car in on a Subaru (which runs just fine, thank you very much, at least so far).

There's just something wrong with a manufacturer that produces cars where major systems fail like this. No wonder people buy so many Toyotas, Lexuses, and Hondas. And Subarus.