I did our big stock-up yesterday with a goal towards parking the Mazda in the garage and not taking it out again until things start cooling off. I have an intermittent fault somewhere in the driver’s door which triggers the door open warning light and makes it next to impossible to lock the door from the inside.I can lock it from the outside, but it requires a lot of fiddling to get the door open light to go off (and I don’t want to leave that on because it’s a drain on the battery).

As far as I can tell the root cause is a short somewhere in the door, which wouldn’t surprise me—that door faces the setting sun and has been baked every summer since 2014. Fixing it will require pulling off the door seal and checking the wires.  Needless to say I cannot do that without dying of hyperthermia at the moment, so the next best thing to do is keep the car out of direct sunlight, drive it as little as possible, and hope that temps cool down to a point next weekend where I can pull it into the garage, take off the door sill and track down the short. Assuming I can find the relevant bit of melted wire, fixing it will be a matter of wrapping some electrician’s tape around the gap in the wire (or possibly some heat-shrink wire wrap, which I have upsatirs).

It will be hot, sweaty, and unpleasant, but better that than paying a garage a grand for labor and diagnostics.