You can turn off the annoying restrictions, change the ordering of some menus and drastically reduce the time of the starting confirmation dialogue box. All you need is a USB to Ethernet adaptor.
Also make sure to disable watchdog or you can get into a reboot loop that makes it difficult to ssh back in and fix (we almost thought we'd have to bring it into the dealer, but we were able to get out of it with some script on that forum).
My predecessor to the Mazda3 (Protege5) was my second Mazda and convinced me that it would likely be my last because over at least a 6 year period Mazda didn't manage to figure out "polish" in cars.
The P5 and predecessor Protege were fun to drive, worked OK, etc. but both were their high-end trimlines and my experiences with the two cars gave me the feeling that Mazda was prone to leaving out stupid really cheap stuff that would have drastically improved the feel/experience of the vehicles.
The examples that still jump out at me are:
* a front passenger door with no internal power lock switch - using the key on the outside you could lock/unlock everything, but from the inside passenger seat you had to lean over to hit the switch on the driver's door. Likely manufacturing cost savings? Maybe $5 including labor? I'd be surprised if the switch and wires would have cost more than $1 at car manufacturer volumes.
* trunk carpeting that was basically nylon felt placed on top of a smooth plastic spare tire cover - not attached anywhere, just sitting there where anything on it would just cause the whole piece of carpet to slide all over the trunk. My fix was 5 hook sides of wide adhesive-backed industrial Velcro. Worked for years with no problem, cost if done at the factory? Probably less than $0.50, but it might have cut into the options of selling aftermarket trunk liners so maybe it was intentional.
* cupholders that were not in fact deep enough to retain any cup, can or bottle commonly sold in US convenience stores during a turn. Make a sporty little car with a stiffened suspension, put in a 5-speed manual, then require that drivers going through curves at speed or turns without a full stop have to hold any beverages in the cupholders or have them go flying underfoot.
The cars themselves were fine for 100-135k miles each and there were workarounds I could put in place for everything, but stupid little crap like that still makes me feel like if they don't care enough to take cheap steps like that then what more expensive things are they skipping?
Hello. I've just ran into the problem of the reboot loop on my Mazda and have an appointment with the dealership on Tuesday. Could you specify how you fixed this issue yourself?
Basically if you modify one of the configuration files and mess up the formatting it'll cause the infotainment software not to work.
If you don't disable watchdog then when it starts up and isn't working watchdog will have it automatically reboot. Since this isn't a transient issue, but a misconfigured file it'll just keep rebooting making it very difficult to ssh back in and fix the file.
If watchdog is disabled then while the infotainment system won't work it's easy to ssh back in and fix the file.
Check this out: http://www.mazda3hacks.com/doku.php
You can turn off the annoying restrictions, change the ordering of some menus and drastically reduce the time of the starting confirmation dialogue box. All you need is a USB to Ethernet adaptor.
Also make sure to disable watchdog or you can get into a reboot loop that makes it difficult to ssh back in and fix (we almost thought we'd have to bring it into the dealer, but we were able to get out of it with some script on that forum).