bad wheel bearing with 79k miles

S

SuperJETT

Member
I know it's a fairly common thing on Mazdas nowadays it seems, but we have a bad right rear bearing. I always thought the loud road noise was from our tires, and even found 3 out of the 4 had flat spots (Falken ZE912) so got new BFG tires this week and the noise didn't change at all.

Anyway, I was going to do it myself but saw they are covered under the 7/100,000 warranty on certified used cars so took it in. $425 is what they wanted to do it until I pointed out they are covered under warranty, so it's being done right now.

Hopefully we have a quiet car again after this.
 
Wow, we can hear wind noise again! Fixed, quiet, and with the new 215/50 tires and alignment this week it's driving perfectly.

I did find out from the service writer about regular vs warranty work. Mazda pays them $87/hour for warranty labor vs $119 regular shop rate, plus for a rear wheel bearing instead of 2 hours of labor, they pay for 1.2 That's $105 total labor instead of $238, big difference to them and a reason to double check any warranty work.
 
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$87-119/hour! That's amazing considering the person doing the work receives <$20/hour.

FYI - The rear wheel bearing is integral to the hub and is held on with 4 bolts. Probably an hour tops to do it on the ground. Pull the wheel, remove the caliper, unplug the ABS connector, and unbolt the hub. Very simple to perform. Part from Rockauto is $100-150. Not that you need to worry about this, for now at least, but if the other side goes after your warranty period you will at least know.
 
I had already looked into pricing on parts to do it myself when I thought about the 7/100k warranty and realized they were covered, so yeah I'm prepared. If one goes out and I have to do it, I'll be putting in Timken bearings too.
 
I haven't done the front bearings on our Mazda5 but I did a Focus which is identical. It's not as easy as the rear, you have to remove the hub and use a press to replace the bearing. I think our van's bearings might be getting a bit noisy up front now with 91K on it so I'll probably be doing them this spring.
 
Update: left front wheel bearing is bad now at 129,000 miles. The fronts are much more involved to replace so I'm probably going to have it done somewhere, just not a Mazda stealer.
 
Thanks for the update. We just put new front hubs/bearings on my wife's Mazda3 (170k miles) because it seemed like a smart thing to do. She's not one to notice differences, but she said it made an improvement.

I can only imagine that the Mazda5s wear them out even quicker.
 
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