do suspension mods invalidate warranty?

[lucifuge]

Does adding sway bars or springs, coilovers...in fact any suspension invalidate the Mx5's warranty?

[Alf]

AFAIK, you don't actually invalidate the whole warranty with mods.

It's more that anything that can possibly be construed to be caused or aggravated by the mods will not be covered.

It would be hard for the dealer or Mazda to claim that an injector failure was aggravated by your mods. Obviously no reasonable person would ask the manufacturer to warrant a collapsed shock absorber after spring replacement. Somewhere in between is a slimy grey area that encapsulates of arguments between dealers and customers.

Where it gets interesting is that any metal or weld fatigues and/breakages in body or frame could be argued to have been aggravated by a stiffer suspension, even a failure in the ECU where an electronic component has broken off the board. It just depends on your relationship with the dealer, as it's largely at their discretion.

In your case, and in my opinion only, the drive train should still be largely in warranty. But then my opinion doesn't necessarily mean a whole lot to dealers.....

Cheers,
Alf

[Garry]

Go to your friendly local Mazda service centre and have a talk to the service manager. Tell him your proposed mods and ask his opinion on their affect on your warranty. He is the person that will have to file the warranty request with Mazda in the event of a warranty claim so he's a good guy to have on your side.

But I think Alf sums it up pretty well in his post.

[Mr Morlock]

I think Garry and Alf provide very useful and sensible advice. In theory a warranty is a written document with inclusions and exclusions. Tyres and batteries for example may be excluded . It surprises me that such a document is not available to the buyer. A concern can be that without a clear outline of what constitutes a supportable warranty claim is that it can be interpreted differently by various dealers or does the decision always get referred to the local head office. Warranties are very important to the buyer and checking whether a modification voids it is a very interesting question.