We have experienced, since Jan 09, a shudder at irregular intervals when driving our manual diesel SXT 6 speed.
By mid-April, this had become of such a concern, and the dealership had been unable to replicate, that they called in an independent assessor who, after 10 days, experienced the same issue.
Turns out it is the regeneration of the DPF being particularly noticeable in our Dodge.
Since then, we were told that Chrylser were working on a fix, but there was no timescale. We asked for a replacement and some form of compensation due to the 26 days in 6 months we were without the car.
Last week we went to leave off letters to the dealership, the manager actually appeared for the first time and told us straight off that they would have no problem replacing the car. We pointed out that we were also seeking reimbursement of our finance agreement payments for the six months that the car was causing difficulties as it was not fit for purpose, mainly as a high end bargaining chip.
Yesterday, my wife called him and was told that we were getting a new car with an upgrade to a DVD player, take it or leave it.
We're going to see the franchise manager today but had a long discussion last night and are fully prepared to take the Dealership to court over selling us a car that they were aware had an issue that had not been resolved (a bit of research shows up similar problems in other manufacturers on diesels with these DPF's, in Mazda's case in particular being quite severe).
If you've experienced even low level hesitation whilst accelerating it is probably this regeneration issue, which shouldn't be felt at all.
The most annoying aspect, which has really got our backs up, is that this problem was known by the manufacturer and there is no solution, but yet we have been spun a line of keek by the dealership since our first complaint in late January, just over a month after delivery.