I introduced myself a couple of days ago over in the New Members area.
Having had my 2022 ND for a couple of months there are one or two things that I’m slightly less than happy about and I’m wondering if there is a solution to them.
Firstly the Satnav, I find it impossible to read in bright sunlight particularly with sunglasses on. The colour combination of a dark grey background with red roads is bizarre. I have increased the brightness and contrast which has helped a bit but I still find it rather strange. I have dived deeply into the manuals and some suggest that the map appearance can be changed but on my car it seems not.
Second comment is the steering. It’s a bit odd.
It’s taken me a while to analyse exactly what I find odd about it, but to me there seems to be a slight deadness around the straight ahead position. Chucking around the Pyrenees a few weeks ago it felt fine but on the Autoroute it is as if there is a very slight reluctance to deviate from straight ahead and then another slight correction is needed to keep it straight because there seems to be no self centering at very small deflections of the steering wheel.
I emphasise that this is very slight but is definitely noticeable to the extent that my wife found it quite demanding on Autoroute driving. To be clear, this is not the sort of wandering which occurred many years ago on older cars with sloppy steering but just the reaction to the tiny inputs which are required.
I would be very interested to hear the comments of those with much more MX-5 experience than me. Is it perhaps something that can be tweaked by alignment?
If you’ve not already checked then too high tyre pressures can affect the steering feel, then again too low also.
I picked up an ND around 5 weeks ago and immediately I got on the motorway I felt the pressures were too high. Sure enough when I check (cold) the following day they were set too high, around 32-33psi. Maybe the previous owners gauge was out, who knows, my two gauges are pretty accurate.
It’s a good idea to get an alignment done, at a proper MX-5 knowledgeable centre/garage.
An edit…
Uneven tyre wear, mismatched tyres, sometimes dealers can stick a mismatched tyre on just to make it road legal for sale etc… All can have an affect on the driving feels of these cars, very sensitive to that I’ve found over the 5 MX-5’s I’ve owned.
I have exactly the same steering feel.I bought my nd last year with 19000 miles on the clock and still on its original eight year old tyres.I replaced them a few months ago after driving it 7000 miles myself.it didn’t really make a big improvement,tyres are advan sports at correct pressure.booked in for an alignment next month.hope it will sort the problem.
I have considered test driving a new one on local road to compare!
I’ve read lots of times on forums, reviews etc of the ND’s steering deadness about the centre. If it makes any difference to the mix, I can’t say I’ve ever experienced that on mine, and also, until they were changed last year, on and up to near 7 years old tyres too. So maybe it isn’t on all NDs, or maybe I can’t drive and don’t know what I’m supposed to be looking for
I’m very new to MX5’s, picked up another on Saturday, but I have driven 4 ND’s in the last 6 weeks and they all exhibit the steering tendency you describe to some degree. It feels like the self centring force to spring it back isn’t high enough or resistance isn’t high enough, and while it isn’t specially concerning on country roads with high levels of steering input, it does feel weird on dual carriageways.
On dual carraigeways I have to concentrate more as the feeling in my hands isn’t the same at dead centre as other cars. My other car has speed assisted steering which feels like 1 full lock to lock for max turning when parking, and then 3 turns lock to lock at speed, but it still doesn’t feel as vague as the ND on the motorway.
Apparently more caster is key to mitigate it, but clearly haven’t tried to head down that path yet.
That’s interesting. I bought the car with11000kms on the clock, so about 6000miles. The tyres are all in excellent condition as you would expect. They were over inflated at 35psi but they are now at 30psi as recommended.
Same dead centre issue with my ND1. It did improve somewhat with new tyres, alignment and correct pressures but it’s still there. Wasn’t one of the big highlights of the ND3 the new steering rack which was said to improve friction on centre to correct this very issue?
You describe exactly the feeling that I have. It’s strange that a sporting car should have such an anomaly in the steering feel.
I know the steering was revised for the 2024 car but I don’t know what that entailed or if it solved the problem or more importantly can it be applied retrospectively?
I pick up a stupidly low miles car on Saturday from a Mazda specialist, after returning my first purchase back. New one has 280miles on the clock. It feels the same as all the others for steering feel lol. Tyres are 29psi and all basically brand new.
I’m sure an hour with a Hunter alignment machine would be better than a production line set up, but its feels similar to all the others and I’m inclined to drive and enjoy currently.
watching online reviews they talk about incremental changes on the ND3 not a radical overhaul, so I thought it might not be worth it. But def a good set up and high caster should help (according to things i’ve read on all the steering topics over the last few months)
I’m a little embarrased to admit but the lane departure warning has come in handy already. I turn it off on every car i have owned but left it on the ND as I think its worth it on dual carriageways .
Are you sure, I think it will make turn in a bit sharper but to the detriment of straight line stability.
I would go parallel and see how it felt and then a smidge of toe in and try again. But I know very little about this black art despite ‘playing’ with the set up on my 7. I ended up just driving it and making the best of what it gave. A bit of ‘all the gear and no idea’ when it came to set up!!
I’ve never had an issue with the screen, I don’t use the built in Sat nav because it isn’t very good, and Android Auto is much better. I would suggest checking with the brightness and contrast in the settings, it does make a big difference.
The odd steering when trying to go in a straight line is something I’ve noticed on a few cars.
Dreadful Renault Megane (never, ever again), (delivery mileage hired in France)
Superb Alfa Romeo 156 Q4, (delivery mileage hired in France),
Peugeot 406 diesel estate (lethally gutless work car 8K on the clock),
Peugeot 3008 SUV (amazing overhead camera views for parking otherwise meh, hired in Germany)
My otherwise excellent Mazda3.
However, when I ditched the Mazda3’s noisy OEM Toyo Nano-energy tyres for much quieter Continental Contact P5s, the changes both of us drivers noticed immediately were astounding.
Wandering steering vanished,
Bumps are better soaked up,
Road holding improved, front wheels no longer tend to skitter sideways on harder cornering,
Fuel economy improved from Toyos long-term average of 40mpg over 23K, to Contis averaging 43mpg over 7K so far.
Speedo is also now closer to satnavs in accuracy.
Alignment related, the ND steering behaviour feeling a little ‘odd’ tends to be related to the adoption of EPAS. You can, to an extent, get familiar with it but it will always feel different to a more traditional hydraulic setup, i.e. for the previous three generations.
It can be improved upon, if you’re feeling the OEM setup doesn’t quite work for you. As ever, Mazda will have settled on alignment settings to suit the EPAS setup and for a range of different driving scenarios and drivers. So some will stick with OEM settings, and some will tweak and also to take account of other modifications.
If you go with a standard alignment garage, you’ll typically get OEM settings dialled in and some will refuse to apply different settings than ‘the book’. This would confirm that you’re back to factory settings, but you might still find you’re left with somel/all of those characteristics you’ve found.
The other option is to ask for what is sometimes referred to a ‘fast road’ setup, that will liven things up a bit. But this can also add in some nervousness and perhaps a bit more tramlining along dual carriageways/motorways. So it might need further adjustment to get to a setup you’re happy with.
Flying Miata settings are here, which could be worth trying:
There’s a lot of castor on the ND anyway but the received wisdom seems to be “the more the better”.
My 8 year old 1.5 has never been checked for alignment unless it was in the first few months before I owned it. Seems fine to me on the Yoko V105’s, the wear is totally even, and the first set lasted 25,000 miles so I infer there’s very little wrong with it.
The steering’s pretty clever IMO, it’s not over heavy at lower speeds and weights up at high speed making it very stable on motorways. It goes where I point it, feels quite direct, and doesn’t need a lot of correcting.
There’s a principle in quantum physics, Heisenberg rings a bell, in which if you try and observe something its behaviour changes. Analysing your steering too minutely while you’re holding the steering wheel will drive you crackers, especially getting on a motorway and trying to work out if it goes in a straight line or ‘pulls’ one way or the other. I learnt long ago to avoid it.
