Front cigarette lighter - Halfords replacement

[catzi]

My front cigarette lighter would heat the lighter element but nothing else would work in it e.g. phone charger, ipod etc. In fact, jiggling the phone charger in it blew the charger

Since the official Mazda lighter is ridiculously expensive, I bought a 'standard' replacement from Halfords for £7 odd. Found to my dismay that the Mazda one is slightly narrower - never mind, a bit of careful filing with the round file and the halfords one fitted perfectly.

Never having done much with cars other than the odd tyre change I am now resting on my laurels and contemplating my first succesful customization!!

Hopefully no one is going to tell me that it is critically important that the front lighter socket is an official Mazda one

[Bob]

Walk quietly away from the Bongo, once you are at least 100 yards clear you can start to run, before the removed lighter socket goes off.

Seriously, good job done, and dead cheap.

[lizard]

Well, the ciggy unit pops out and would burn the carpet when I tried mine. Lucky I don't use it for smoking

[jaylee]

I hard-wired a double ciggy socket in mine behind the dash for the sat nav more than anything else to plug into...
The cable runs nicely behind the dash & comes out just by the drivers windscreen pillar, it cuts out the unsightly trailing power/charging wires!

The original lighter socket i've never had a problem with. (occasionally a slight jiggle of one of the charger units to get the power light on, but that's all.)
I did puzzle me why the manufacturer didn't back-light the socket, but i remedied that with a strategically placed blue led behind the green transparent socket trim.