Mazda SKYACTIV-MT

Mazda's six-speed manual — in the 2, 3, 6, MX-5, CX-3, CX-30 and CX-5.

It exists on this site mostly to be told apart from the automatic, because Mazda gave both the same family name: a car described only as SKYACTIV may have either, and the two share no parts, no fluid and no failure modes.

The gearbox itself was designed around shortening the throw and lowering the mass of what the lever has to move, which is why it feels unlike the five-speed it replaced and why the MX-5's is widely regarded as among the best manual shifts made.

A manual gearbox's faults are usually not the gearbox. In order of likelihood: the clutch (a slip under load in the tall gears, or a bite point that has climbed towards the top of the pedal); the shifter cables and their bushes, which produce a vague or notchy change that reads as a worn gearbox and is not; and the release bearing, whose noise appears and disappears with the pedal. Only after those does a synchro come into it, and when one does go it is very often second gear, crunching on a fast cold change and nowhere else.

A gearbox that whines in every gear including neutral is the input shaft bearing; one that whines in every gear except top is normal gear noise carried by the lay shaft.