Mazda Reviews

Conventional wisdom says the first place to start looking is the turbocharger and its plumbing. A turbocharger operates at very high speeds and a whistling noise is quite common. What you shouldn’t have, however, is a loud version of that noise, or a whistle that is suddenly louder than ever before.

Cracked or leaking turbo-plumbing can allow the noise to escape, but a turbocharger with a worn bearing can also suddenly become louder in its operation. So that’s where to start looking.

Why does the noise drop in the higher gears? Perhaps because you’re cruising in those gears and not accelerating hard as you do in the lower gears. Less throttle input means a slower turbocharger speed and a drop in turbo volume and pitch.

It all depends on how you define long and bulky. But no seven-seater is going to be exactly small, is it? That’s because, to accommodate the third row of seats necessary to seat seven a vehicle physically has to be a certain length and there’s just no getting around that.

But I take your point; a lot of the seven-seat SUVs out there do seem pretty big. Again, however, that’s not a bad thing if you plan to fill all three rows of seats and still have some room left for luggage. The smaller seven-seaters aren’t all that good at this as the third row gobbles up the luggage space, making these cars best for those who only need seven seats on an occasional basis. If that’s your situation there are lots of mid-sized seven seaters around, but they’re pretty much all SUVs.

And while it goes against your preference for a smaller vehicle, the very best seven-seaters aren’t SUVs. They’re usually people-mover vans such as the Ford Tourneo, Kia Carnival and VW ID. Buzz. In fact, some of these even seat eight. They’re also a lot better for accessing the rearmost row of seats and they’ll still have lots of luggage space even with all seats occupied. And, yes, they look big, but that’s physics for you.

In the meantime, you could look at slightly less bulky options including the Hyundai Santa Fe, Kia Sorento, Mazda CX-80 and Toyota Kluger. There’s also been speculation recently that Subaru’s seven-seat Tribeca might make a return to the Australian market.

A trip to your local transmission specialist is the first step here, and don’t even think about driving the vehicle father than that. You could easily do more damage than is already existing. Modern automatic transmissions are incredibly complex things and there’s a lot that can go wrong.

You might be lucky and simply have a low transmission fluid level (although you’ll still need to find and fix the cause of the leak). But, equally, you may have a transmission that is literally on its last legs. The problem is that all these symptoms can show up through all sorts of transmission woes.

Either way, a specialist workshop should be able to diagnose the problem and work from there.