The wife came home from work one day and told me that her co-worker’s car–an 1987 626LX with all the goodies, an excellent exterior and pretty low miles–had been broken into and vandalized. Left unlocked in the driveway one night, it fell prey to a razor blade-wielding suitor who’d been scorned by his teenage daughter. The would-be Lothario had snapped the wiper stalk, stolen the radio knobs and taken his blade to he door panels, dash pad and every seat except the driver’s. I knew the car would be totaled by the insurance company, so I told him I’d give him an extra $100 if he’d buy it back. Sure enough, the insurance company totaled the car, which he bought back, and soon I was off to the dealer’s lot. I bought the car for about $800 and then drove it home.
After quickly locating a used wiper stalk and buying new radio knobs from the dealer, I went hunting for interior parts at local wrecking yards. It didn’t take long to find door panels for $100. I sourced a $50 rear seat from another car that also had a usable dash pad. They yard guy said he’d let me have the dash pad for free, provided I was brave enough to remove it myself. Being young (and thus having more time than money), I took the deal.
The removal process wasn’t easy: At the factory, this particular model’s dash pad is installed before the dash goes in, and to make matters worse, the donor car had been T-boned and the driver’s door wouldn’t open. Getting it out took a couple of hours, and even then only because I was willing to break some unneeded parts along the way. Needless to say, my hands acquired assorted cuts and scratches in the process. Ultimately, I found the whole experience so traumatic that I just let the pad sit in the garage for a long while. It was just as well.
A couple of months after the deal was done, I got a letter from the state. In it, they informed me that the car was considered a total loss and gave me two weeks to surrender the title. Getting a new title would require an inspection by the state patrol, so it was a good thing I hadn’t replaced the dash pad with the original VIN tag. I showed up with the uninstalled pad laying in the back seat. After removing the VIN tags from both pads and turning them over to the trooper doing the inspection, he installed a state-supplied “assigned VIN number” tag. Try as I might, I couldn’t find a matching replacement front seat; instead, we stuck with the sheepskin seat covers already on the passenger seat and called it good to go.
My wife and I were quite happy with the car–she especially so, because it was blue (her preferred color) and had an automatic, which she still appreciated despite not doing much stop-and-go driving any more. I would have preferred the five-speed, and the car lacked the precise handling of its RWD predecessor, but generally I liked it. I did want more grip than the 185/70 14 all-season tires provided, so I upgraded to 215/60 14 performance tires. I recall that my favorite thing about that car was its cool, oscillating center A/C vents; in fact, they so greatly impressed one of my friends that he bought an 1988 model for himself.
We drove it, happily, for quite a while, even taking it on a couple of long but pleasant road trips. The only time I was less than 100% happy with the car was during a grand-loop summer road trip to visit some of my relatives, who lived in Kansas, as well as my wife’s family in North Dakota and Colorado. We decided to see visit Colorado first, then head down to Kansas, and then drive up to North Dakota. That meant traveling over the stretch of the U.S. interstate system with the highest elevations in the country. As we approached the Eisenhower Tunnel to cross under the continental divide, the combination of high altitude and steep grade kept us in the right lane, doing maybe 50 mph flat-out. Nevertheless, the Mazda got us over and down to Denver and all was well again.
After more than a year of happy motoring, my wife was driving to work down a twisty road with a posted 50 mph speed limit. As she rounded a blind corner, she hit a 100-foot stretch of gravel-strewn road and wound up spinning into the roadside embankment. The impact wasn’t all that hard, but it did tear up the bumper cover and break one of the parking lights. She backed out quickly (this was the pre-cellular era) and continued on to work. She called me as soon as she got there and said that she hadn’t yet called the police; I advised her to do so in order to establish that she wasn’t at fault.
Unfortunately, the state trooper was less than sympathetic, claiming that she must have been going too fast for conditions. Strictly speaking, that was true: Her speed might have been excessive for a gravel-covered curve, but who expects to find gravel strewn over a state highway with a 50-mph speed limit?
Eventually he admitted that several other people had spun out in the same location, but by the time he’d reached the scene, most of the gravel had been dispersed from the road. He continued to insist she was at fault, and he proceeded to bitch her out, saying she was lucky he didn’t track her down and give her a ticket for reckless driving. She was pretty angry and, as far as she was concerned, the car was now permanently tainted. We decided the damage wasn’t worth involving the insurance company, so I simply replaced the lens and called it good enough.
Later, another of my wife’s co-workers mentioned that he was tired of driving the Subaru he wound up with post-divorce. He’d had enough of its manual transmission, the drone from the flat-four engine, no A/C and the fact that his ex-wife really had beaten it up–not to mention that it reminded him of the recent divorce that had taken him to the cleaner. I asked my wife to find out if he might be interested in our Mazda, since he had ridden in it many times both before and after we owned it. He snapped at the chance; after all, the Mazda was so much more luxurious and, despite the messed up bumper cover, looked a lot better overall. A post-divorce bankruptcy hadn’t left him with much cash, so we struck a deal: He’d sell the Subaru, which would give him enough to make a down payment greater than my investment, and we’d give him the keys to the Mazda. The total of his subsequent monthly payments would not only add up to a good profit, but also compensate me for the costs of the new title and messed-up bumper cover. Once he’d paid the car off, he wanted to get the bumper fixed. I ordered up an aftermarket bumper cover for him to have painted, which put a few more dollars of profit in my pocket.
Since we’d been happy with the 626, I kept my eye out for another of similar vintage. The idea was to drive it for a while before converting it to extra cash in my pocket. Soon I found a non-running blue 1984 626 for sale. Based on the car’s description and mileage, I concluded that the timing belt was shot. Having replaced a few timing belts on this family of engines, and knowing that the 2.0 was a non-interference engine, I figured it was worth a look. It turned out to be a base model five-speed, no A/C, and in pretty good shape overall. It definitely sounded like the timing belt had snapped, so I took a gamble, made a deal and towed it home. One timing belt and a a couple of hours later, I had a pretty good car.
However, it didn’t take long for the wife to decide that she preferred an automatic, and for both of us to decide that A/C was pretty good to have on trips beyond western Washington. I also found that even mated to the five-speed, the carbureted 2.0-liter engine lacked the power and driveablity of the fuel-injected version in the 1987 but had no real advantage in fuel economy. In short, there wasn’t much love for that 626. Once more, I wound up selling it to a friend/customer in need of a car. This fellow had totaled his old one without having collision insurance or much cash in the bank. He gave me his totaled car, which I parted out and sold for scrap, plus a few dollars for the down payment. He paid the balance over a couple of months, which allowed me to make a little profit. That car was the last Mazda in our family fleet–and despite my experience with the ’84, I don’t think there was a better car overall in its class, and one I’ve not hesitated to buy or recommend.
[curbside pics by PN]
I’ve always liked the 626 and the later 6 models, and I’ve had a few of the last generation cars as rentals.
Yeah, good cars, with very good bang-for-buck. My brother got a new 626 in 2001, and he found it to be reliable and reasonably fun to drive. He only recently replaced it with a new Chevy Volt, which hopefully will provide bang-for-buck in its own way.
I’m glad you liked yours. My wife had an ’86 or ’87 coupe which was not a pleasant experience. The basic car was fine, but virtually every electrical component required replacement at least once. 2 heater cores went, not a pleasant or inexpensive job on these cars. The contoured headlights were vulnerable to damage and very expensive. it just went on from there. A lot of the problems were covered by warranty, but they all came back shortly after it expired it seemed. One good thing, they were well represented in local wrecking yards. You had to be quick on the headlights and power window motors though. Very popular items. All in all it would have embarassed GM even then.
It was an enjoyable car to drive when all was well, but it cost way too much in time and money to keep it alive. Maybe she got a bad example, but to this day she won’t even look at Mazdas when we are in the market for a car.
Yes those aero headlights were very expensive for their time. I quickly put headlight covers on ours. Can’t say if one of them would have been broken if I didn’t have them but I never had to replace one on mine.
As far as being reliable the only non regular maintenance item I ever did on that car was the heater core valve. It was packed up under the dash so access was tight but it was not a particularly time consuming repair.
One of these almost wound up being my first car, an ’89 coupe. I really liked the dashboard layout and thought it looked sporty enough to reasonably impress the girls in my high school. It would have been mine if my friend hadn’t wrecked his ’86 Mercury Cougar and had his father, a salesman at the local Lincoln/Mercury dealership, find him a nearly identical replacement. He sold me his wrecked Cougar for $300, which other than needing a new fender and bumper cover was in really nice shape. So it was pretty much a no-brainer. But I always liked the 626 models and came across a few more recently while looking for a cheap work car. I think what turned me off of them was that I heard it shared a lot of basic components with the Ford Contour, a car my wife and I didn’t have much luck with.
The 626 has never shared much of anything with the Contour. Totally different platform, and despite both having a 2.0L I4 and 2.5L V6 available, Mazda and Ford had completely separate engine families at this point.
I worked at Mazda as a summer job when these cars were in their heyday. They were, in my opinion, damned good cars. The rear suspension, for example, was a better design than anything I had ever seen. Everything was well designed and finished. The were comfortable and drove well. They were a little underpowered for mountain drives but name me a car of the era that wasn’t. Heck, in 1990, traffic went up the Coquihalla at a steady 80 hm/h. These days it is more like 120 km/h.
Have a look at the interior in the car pictured. Although dirty, it is still in good condition and this in a car that is a quarter century old. Good cars all around.
This generation of 626 was exceptionally popular in Germany at the time, one of the first Japanese cars to really make some inroads into that tough market. It’s rep there was for being extremely reliable, which was backed up by ADAC statistics of highway/freeway breakdowns.
After this model was finished for our consumption, all the tooling was shipped, lock, stock and barrel to Kia in Korea. They then produced it for another decade or so under different names, like the Kia Capital/Concord. My Korean friends swore they were the best cars available in Korea at the time and one of the few Korean made cars they would buy used. Most used a 1.5 litre engine.
Hate to go against the grain here but selling these things used in OZ required proof of a headgasket replacement not a good rep for Mazda after the RWD original. Awful understeering things to drive they might be ok in US freeway world but on twisty roads forget it, real easy to see the US was the target market these cars have the turn in capabilities of a river barge
That is strange about the head gasket issue, I only ever did one on that family of engines and it was the second one mentioned in the article. That was because the guy that bought it from me had the water pump fail on it and he continued to drive it until it wouldn’t go.
As far as handling goes I’m not sure if our version was set up the same as yours but compared to the FWD competition we had around here it was far better than most. Much more precise steering, predictable handling, and controlled ride than say an Accord or Camry of the same vintage. Definitely behind it’s RWD predecessor though.
That is odd on the head gasket problem. The basic mechanicals were not problematic on these as a rule. I kept expecting problems, given how poorly the rest of the car held up, but it always ran. My wife’s handled nicely in mountainous BC terrain as well. Maybe OZ spec cars differed somehow?
Perhaps the cars in Andalusia were Japanese market grey-imports as many Japanese cars, especially into NZ, are. For good reason, too, since Japanese don’t drive much and don’t like used ANYTHING, let alone cars. Clean used cars with low kms go for song in Japan.
That said, Japan is not a “g-force in the twisties” kind of place. For 90% of the drivers in Japan, driving is heavy traffic and even heavier law enforcement. For this reason a smooth ride is paramount since you’d never get to appreciate the advantages of a firm suspension anyway.
The cars here were well set up and handled very nicely. I have also never experienced head gasket problems on any 626 of the era. In fact, we made next to nothing on these cars in our garage business.
Grey imports into Australia are very limited generally to cars not originally sold here by their manufacturer, and it is rare for cars other than sports-type or diesel SUV’s or similar to be imported.
These cars sold as Mazdas and Fords Telstars and dont have the greatest rep the engines should be bullet proof as the same block is used for the diesel but for some reason head gasket replacements were common I dont know why but friends who had them had trouble
A certain song by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band is going through my head right now…
much as i love mighty quinn …blinded by the light… i dont even think thats the name is it
I believe it is. Here is a link to a video of it on Youtube:
http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=Q2-GqYkwjTM&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DQ2-GqYkwjTM
When I got out of school in 1985, the Honda Accord was in the process of displacing the Olds Cutlass as the go-to new car for a fresh law school grad starting life. The flip side was that Accords were expensive, and the dealers were really hard to work with. I had two friends who bought 626s instead.
Visually, the cars looked a lot to me like the 84-85 Accord. But with the new Honda in 86, they no longer looked similar. Anyway, I sort of expected the Mazda to take on a strong third place behind the Accord and Camry in the US, but it never really happened. The Mazda remained more of a niche player (though one of the larger ones).
I don’t understand why this era 626 didn’t do better, it was a better car than the Accord or Camry in many ways and most of the dealers weren’t adding ADP stickers like was so common on the Accord and Camry at the time.
Mazda sold a lot of 626 here in Norway. But they are all rusted away now. I remember these car as extremely noisy car. Tire noise was at a very high level. Problems with the head gaskets and expensive parts.
There were several of these in my family, starting with an 83 model purchased used in 1987. That car got us through numerous trips over the Coquihalla albeit not very quickly. There was actually a second identical car that was purchased in about 94/95 to replace the original that my Mom piled up the front end of. The second one needed an engine when purchased as I recall, but I was young at the time so I may not remember that well. There were one or two head gaskets done on these cars, I’m not sure if it was 2 on the second one or one each anymore. The first time was my Mom, it had a leaky radiator and she kept driving it. The second time was my dad, he left it running in the driveway while working on it then walked away and it overheated. This second car was eventually too rusty and was replaced with an 86 5 door, a model I never have seen too many of. My mom later wrote that car off too. Most of them I’ve seen were sedans. The later fuel injected motor was much smoother and somewhat more powerful too. All were good reliable cars without too many issues that weren’t caused by us.
I’ve owned a total of five Mazda 626s to date, including an ’85 (the year before fuel injection was added), three ’94s, and a ’96. All were 5-speed, and two had the V6 KL motor. I always considered them to be very underrated cars, especially with the V6/5-speed combo. The previous owner of my ’85 took all the emissions junk out and added a Weber 32/36 carb. That car was surprising sprightly and toss-able. They were very reliable cars when properly cared for (I got 287k out of my ’96 before the head gasket packed up) provided that you got the manual transmission. Unfortunately, most 626s were equipped with the automatic, which weren’t known for their durability (the Ford-built CD4E offered in ’94-’02 models were particularly horrible) which ruined the reputation of the car.
+1 on the CD4E comment. That transmission was also used in the Contour/Mystique and FWD Cougar. Mine grenaded in my ’99 at 65k!
These 626s and their badge-engineered Ford Telstar twins used to be everywhere here in New Zealand in the 80s and 90s. Hardly any left now, which is a shame as they were always quite decent cars – nice looking, generally reliable, very well built. Sedan, hatch and coupe in gen 1; gen 2 (88+) also added a station wagon. My parents had a ’90 wagon for several years (although it was the Ford Telstar-badged version). Did the US got the gen 1 and/or gen 2 hatch? All our gen 1s had flush lights, but with a different front end for the hatch/coupe. They had a lower nose and slimmer lights than the sedan. Pic below is an ’84 hatch and an ’85 sedan.
We didn’t get the Telestar, but we did get the Probe, which was based on either the GD/GE 626 chassis, as you probably know already.
Ah, yes I’d forgotten about the Probe. I knew the gen 2 Probe was based off the GE platform, didn’t realise the gen 1 was based off the GD. So you’ve taught me something! 🙂 We never got gen 1 here, never seen one in the metal. I like the looks though and recently bought the brochure off eBay. We did get the gen 2 Probe new as a quasi-Capri/Sierra XR4i replacement. It didn’t sell, and the few left are dirt cheap. We did get the GE and GD Mazda MX6 coupes.
The front end on your hatch was what all of our 86 and 87s looked like and yes the hatch was available but it did not seem to sell very well.
Here’s a ’84 626 “Sporthatch 2.0 Limited” hatch and an ’86 Telstar “TX5i Ghia” for comparison. Both are New Zealand-new, and both are currently for sale on trademe. NB: The Telstar isn’t really left hand drive, I just flipped the photo to match the 626.
Mum had one of the first Australian-delivered 626 Hatch SuperDeluxe autos from new. It was the car I learnt to drive in. No power steering and a reasonably large turning circle. Built very solidly, and lasted her for 20 years or so.
It had a few issues – the adjustable air suspension died and was replaced with conventional shocks, the heater tap died towards the end, and the starter motor a couple of times. No head gasket though – I’m surprised to hear that
We lucked out though – Japan got turbo versions of the 2DR. And Japan had the long and short nose versions of both the Hatch and Sedan.
We had the 626GT which was powered by the turbo engine and came with the (electronically) adjustable shocks. The were pretty rare around here.
My friend’s little brother had one through high school and college. It was a 5-speed hatchback, and must have been a pretty durable car to survive five years of him driving it. My favorite memory of that car was his mother telling me about the time his girlfriend kicked the windshield out of it from the inside. “He told me he was tickling her at the time,” she said while rolling her eyes.
The generation as originally pictures was available as a turbo in 86/87 as well, but again not very common. Also has anybody else ever noticed that the wheels on these cars look just like the ones used on Hot Wheels of roughly the same era?
This was my family’s first “bought car” when I was growing up. Dad had an ’84 LX touring hatchback in white, with the same wheels as the car pictured above. He bought it entirely based on *his* dad’s experience with an ’86 base model. The ’84 never seemed to be able to have all of it’s problems sorted out, with flaky headgaskets and various trim pieces just falling off. The thing even got stolen twice and abandoned within less than 4 blocks both times. However, when it worked, it was wonderful to ride in, and the swinging vents seemed to provide no end of entertainment. That being said, in 2 years, the engine killed itself.
My grandfather’s ’86 went on to my dad when that happened. It managed to last 14 years, and 250k on the odometer before dying itself. By that point, Dad was getting bigger and wanted something a bit more “luxurious” so he went for an Intrepid. Meanwhile I was getting ready to buy my first car and kept the tradition alive, with a ’99 626 4-cyl. Like the hatchback, it had various woes, but when it worked, did it ever. Mazda never had the reputation of Honda or Toyota, but I’m pretty sure those that knew about them really kept the torch going, especially in that bleak period in the early aughts.