Anyone here with Proteges. I just bought my daughter a '99w/48K and am looking for good boards to acquire maintenance/repair info for future reference. I've found what looks like the big 3, but am not satisfied with the discourse I read.

BTW, driving this small sedan up to her at college (320 miles) was really eye-opening. It has a very pleasing ride and handling was very good. I had no idea Mazdas smaller sedans were this nice. Some of the interior materials are sub-CamCord, but the overall interior was very comfortable.

If you know of good Protege boards, fess-up.

google search brings up a lot, i remember searching for them to find something on mazda...

i'll have to ask my brother. he has the last year of the protege (03???). not sure if he bothers with anything online or not though! :dunno:

OwAce...I found: msprotege, protegeclub and clubprotege searching, but like I said, they're not what I'm looking for. Too much boyracer dialog.

Looking for the DA, CC equivalent for Proteges.

Wardsweb... I believe you said you have other car sites, are any Mazda sites?

TIA anysia.

You might want to try looking for the Mazda6 forums such as mazda6club.com. I'm sure if you have a question about the protege, someone on there will be able to answer it.

The problem with the forums for the economy class cars such as Corollas, Mazda 3s, Civics, and in your case Proteges is they're usually the first cars for first-time owners (read: boy racers). So those forums will be less mature, less informative and generally ruder than sites like this one. I was at clubsi.com for 3 years and didn't post more than 150 posts because it's hard to find anyone that would answer my questions maturely. The general theme there is "how can I mod my car to be faster than xxxxx" or "How to obtain 300+ HP?". Then you come over to da.net and you get questions like "how to get rid of rattling.." v6p.net is more about selling stuff and turbos and mods to the cars than anything else. The bottom line is, you're probably not going to find any other forums that's even close to the comfort of da.net! :thmsup:

Here's another on that's pretty good.

Mazda3forums (http://mazda3forums.com/)

Another excellent Mazda forum is MPVClub.com, of which I am also a regular (I believe I1 is there too) . There are a few protege owners there who should be able to answer pro related questions or in the very least point you to the appropriate resouces.

I traded in the Protege 5 for the Accord... that was a fun little car, very cute too...

Anyway, this is a great board for Protege and other Mazda info; there are better boards out there for Mazda6 and RX8, but this was the best one for Protege I found:

http://www.msprotege.com/forum/

I also traded a Protege5 for my Accord. I had an '02 5spd on which I racked up 65,000mi in just under 5 years without so much as 1 mechanical problem. It did tend to go through brakes a little too quickly- front pads and rotors @35k, rear pads and rotors @ 55k.

All told, though a little on the slow side, I loved the car. VERY fun to drive and a great handler. I miss the stick, but my accord will handily dust it any day.

My mother has also had a protege for 10 years- though most of that time it has served as a secondary car at her vacation home. A 1995 ES which is MISERABLY slow (automatic, to boot), but has been ultra reliable with the exception of batteries and brakes. Same protege hallmarks of good ride and handling with decent looks.

They don't hold value particlarly well as Mazda hasn't yet gotten the golden reputation of Toyota or Honda, but the Protege is a very well built car. This will play to your advantage when buying one- but kill you when selling (I only got $8700 trade for my '02). Do some reading on Car And Driver- they always loved protege's. I'd buy one over a civic, corolla, or sentra any day.

"They don't hold value particlarly well as Mazda hasn't yet gotten the golden reputation of Toyota or Honda, but the Protege is a very well built car. This will play to your advantage when buying one-"

Exactly what I was looking for, Japanese build quality and really bad depreciation in a nicely equipped (power package w/sunroof), fun, hopefully reliable and long-lived sedan with lots of space inside. As I said earlier, I'm new to Mazdas, but this little sedan offers a lot in an attractively styled, good handling and riding econobox.

I'll be on the lookout for another one for my youngest son. Maybe in a few months the '01s will fall into my price range. :biggrin: