I can tell you we had something kinda similar happen on a Ford. Not a tailgate issue but was an issue with water getting where it shouldn’t and freezing. It was getting into the air intake at the hood cowl by rain or snow melting. This somehow would get into the blower assembly then if the temperatures dropped low enough it would freeze. At this point you’re not going to have any hear or defrost. Depending on how bad it was sometimes you would be ok once the car thawed but in other cases the blower would need to be replaced. Ford did not just say environmental and refuse to do anything. They released a few updates to the parts in that intake to mitigate it and covered it under warranty. The Ford issue also mainly affected northern US and Canada customers.
This is definitely disappointing as Mazda should probably make a change to mitigate that issue either for the water ingress or the safety mechanism on the hatch motors or both.
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