Three problems related to automatic transmission cooler have been reported for the 1996 Mazda 626. The most recently reported issues are listed below.
I have a 1996 Mazda 626 with 80,000 miles on it. The transmission has failed on it, and I am told by the dealer that it needs to be replaced and a cooling unit has to be installed. Apparently, this is a well known problem by the Mazda and they failed to warn the owners to install this cooling unit to prevent transmission problems.
No transmission shops will work on the car because they've already tried to fix several and they keep coming back. Apparently the cooling system that Mazda/Ford installed into the transmisison wasn't enough, so after 60k miles transmission burned up.
Transmission problem with a automatic 1996 Mazda 626 2. 0 liter 4 cyl. We bought the car with something wrong with the transmission but we didn't know what exactly what the problem was. So we bring it home and it wouldn't go into gear so we decide we have to rebuild the transmission. We get on the internet and search for any recalls on the tranny or the car and on some websites we found that the tranny is too small for that particular make of car and it tends to overheat and found a TSB that said the car needed a tranny cooling system b/c when it would overheat it would just crash, and we also saw that a lot of people were having this same problem and that they have had their tranny replaced 2 or 3 times b/c of the overheating, and I would love to know that Mazda would stand by their product and help everyone out that is having this problem b/c we think this should have been done right the first time.