2017 CX-5 owner. A few years ago the infotainment system started acting up: rebooting every couple of minutes, never loading the navigation properly, made it impossible to listen to music (except sometimes it didn’t interrupt the radio if that option was selected). When I first mentioned this to the service people at my local Mazda dealer, they bluntly told me the only remedy was a full system upgrade at a cost of about $1,200. I wasn’t willing to pay that, so I decided to just put up with it. Then in the last year or so it also developed the ghost touch issue that I’ve seen many other people mention: randomly changing settings, retuning the radio etc. Annoying, but still not worth a four figure outlay to fix. Then recently it developed the potentially dangerous habit of suddenly cranking the volume WAY up and yelling NAVIGATION INSTRUCTIONS WILL BE AT THIS VOLUME. You really don’t need that when driving.

I saw someone else on Reddit had the very same issue and managed to get it all fixed for free by taking it up with higher management of Mazda USA, so I went back to the dealer to see if they could offer anything better than the four figure fix they had come up with before. Well, they certainly did. New service manager at the dealer – she told me I qualified for After Warranty Assistance (I didn’t know this was a thing), and that they would replace the display unit for free – she told me there is a known manufacturing issue with older display units that allowed moisture ingress/entrapment which could interfere with the circuitry and cause the random ghost touch actions.

With regard to the constant rebooting, that was apparently fixed by just removing the memory card. This means no maps/navigation function at all, but since I only ever use my phone for navigation, that’s something I can live without. Tested the fix driving by home from the dealer (25 mins) blasting The Jesus and Mary Chain on Spotify and was not interrupted once.

So there you have it – no more ghost touch, no more constant rebooting (so far), and they fixed it for free. I just wish they’d told me that the first time I brought it up with them.

​