[Allen In Texas Hill Country]

Of what little I saw it looked a bit dark but was mostly gone by the time I got the car off the freeway. I hardly/never looked in the rear view mirror while getting the car off a busy freeway.

[dinodino]

Looks like this is common with your car. Check out this discussion on Edmunds.com:

http://www.edmunds.com/mazda/cx-7/2008/consumer-discussions.html

Here’s one of several incidents like yours:

“Our 2008 Mazda CX-7 (Sport, AWD) had a compressor failure at just a hair over 30,000 miles. This occurred on our way back from vacation, through the hills of West Virginia. We started smelling burnt rubber. Shortly after that, I heard a loud bang - I lost power steering and all of my check engine lights came on. This was at 1AM. I was able to coast to an exit and find a hotel (had my wife, toddler, and infant). When I opened up the hood, the belts were shredded and coolant had sprayed everywhere.”