Final update...I hope. Service dept. called today and informed me they swapped out the serpentine belt and the sound went away both on the lift and a test drive. Wife and I picked her up a few hours ago and ran a few errands around town on roads with speed limits varying from 25 to 50 and didn't hear the sound at all! Service advisor feels that the belt was stretched from the faulty tensioner which they replaced two weeks ago. At that time though they wouldn't cover the belt under warranty ($55) so they re-used the original belt and sound persisted. Today I got a new belt for free and no more noise!

So any other 2.0 owners with an intermittent rattling/ticking coming from the right front tell the dealer to check both the serp. belt and tensioner.

 

pm'ed

 

And.....1yr 3mo bump! Wife told me last week that she started hearing the same noise again. Of course I checked my records and found that I had it fixed in March of 2013 so the warranty is not valid.

Thought I'd post in here to see if any others are still experiencing this or if anyone had it fixed, as I did and it came back. Have to wonder if Mazda got enough complaints of this to revise the tensioner? I'll be checking into that before replacing it.