What's an acceptable breakdown rate for a new car?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Not even sure what the right term is …

Bought a new Mazda3 13 months ago and 34 thousand miles ago, so I’ reaching the end of warranty. Tomorrow I’ll be bringing it in for its 3rd repair. This is only the second new car I’ve bought. The first, another Mazda, had zero problems under warranty.

3 seems excessive to me. To be fair, though, the first two are possibly attributable to excessive wear and tear. Pretty minor – I broke a shock absorber and didn’t notice till I went in for an oil change. The other thing was that the weather stripping around one of the passenger doors came loose and partly fell out. I carry a lot of passengers and it’s possible something they were carrying caught on it and ripped it loose. The new thing is that the windshield wipers have stopped working. Yesterday they started vibrating very badly in “automatic” mode, and today they stopped altogether.

My question: how many things would need to fail on your new car before you write off the idea of buying another of the same model a few years down the line as a replacement?

2

I had a transmission fail on me at 24,000 miles, so that kind of soured me on that model. . .

To me, your problems aren’t dealbreakers, at least not yet. The real issue is what happens next. If you have other suspension problems, if your headliner decides to fall as well as your weather stripping, if your replacement windshield wiper motor also fails, etc.

The other thing you can do is check a source like Consumer Reports with long-term reliability figures to see if the same problems keep coming up year after year. That raises real red flags to me.