Mazda had a reputation in the past for building fun, sporty cars. I used to own a 1989 626 and it was a great little car, pretty clearly the best car I ever owned. Inexpensive to buy, rock solid and maintenance-free, and fun to drive. Think a more sporty Toyota Camry at a huge discount. However, the company drifted from that core mission over the years and produced some very uninspiring and disappointing cars through the 1990's. I remember getting a later model Mazda 626 as a rental car a few years back and being shocked at how far the company had fallen. But Mazda appears to be turning things around. Their new line-up feels a lot more like those earlier cars. At the head of Mazda's stable of new designs is an all-new rotary sports car, the RX-8. I have had mine for about three weeks now and am very pleased with my decision to buy one. I think it an excellent value.
Exterior: Not much to say here, you can look at the pictures and see what you think without any help from me. Personally, I think it is a very sharp looking car. It is definitely a hot, sexy-looking sports car car but somehow it manages this without looking overly ostentatious. The designers have also integrated the rotary engine rotor motif into the car design in a nice way. There is a rotor-shaped indention in the hood, and smaller rotors in the grill work both behind and in front of the car. There are even rotor shaped metallic accents in the seat headrests. It's a thoughtful design that grows on you the more you look at it.
Interior: The seats are very comfortable and supportive, with decent bolstering. I did not find it at all hard to get comfortable in this car. I will note that I am a very tall guy (6'4") and I fit quite comfortably into the version without the sunroof. If you are a tall guy who thought you could never fit in a sports car like this, you should definitely check this car out before assuming it's too small. The sunroof eats almost two inches of headroom, however, so you may need to skip the "GT" package that includes it.
The layout inside is simple, well-designed and very purpose-built for driving. This is a real sports car, not some "sport touring" poser filled with a bunch of cushy gadgets (at least my version is - you can get it with DVD navigation, heated power seats etc. but all that stuff is expensive and, in my view, utterly unnecessary. It's a sports car, it should be comfortable but simple.)
The full gage setup is unusual. There is a huge, deeply recessed tachometer in the center of the gage cluster, with a digital speedometer nestled into the bottom right corner of the tach. That's the only speedometer in the entire car. I was very dubious of this design initially. However, this design has actually won me over. The more I use it, the more I like it. It is actually more efficient because one glance down gets you both pieces of information more quickly than if you had to read two dial gages at once. Also, you will find that the tachometer is much more important on this car than on many others. More about that later.
The stereo controls are simple and efficient, as are the ventilation and heating controls. These are manual only, no fancy automatic climate control system here. However, the stereo, clock and climate control system indicators are all integrated into a single display panel at the top of the center stack. It is a very clean, well-implemented design.
Visibility to the front and sides is outstanding, but only fair to the rear. The thick rear pillars eat up a lot of visibility, and the wing mirrors are fairly small. Looking out the back feels like driving a convertible with the top up. You need to pay close attention when changing lanes because of the blind spots.
The back seats have fairly little legroom, but are otherwise better than might be expected. There is decent headroom and they are actually quite comfortable. Access to the rear seats is easy because of the suicide-style rear swinging doors. However, the rear windows are very small and only open out a little bit. It feels kind of like being in an executive jet airline seat back there. The big driveshaft tunnel divides the backseat so there are only two seats in the back. The driveshaft tunnel also contains most of the storage space for the car, integrating storage units, cupholders and armrest all into a quite tall tunnel.
Driving: The analogy to a jet is appropriate to this car in more ways than one. The handling in this car is absolutely amazing. The weight is all extremely low in the car, the tires are huge 18" low profile tires, the body is built around an extremely strongly boxed center tunnel that keeps the body very very tight. All that means that the RX-8 corners like a go-kart with just unbelievable stability. The steering is tight and precise, providing good feedback and road feel. The suspension is also very communicative, you feel like you know what's going on all the time. The limits of the car don't rush up at you, they build gradually and you have plenty of warning before you reach them and the stability system has to kick in to save your butt. However, the handling limits of this car are so much higher than other cars that you really have to drive like a maniac to even approach them. This is a car that can be driven very aggressively on your favorite twisty two-lane. It goes where you point it and sticks like glue to the road.
My biggest problem with the suspension is when I start driving my wife's car and forget that I'm not in my own ;-)
Of course, anybody could make a car that focuses on handling to the expense of all else. The real trick is to take a car that is as tight and stiff as this, and make it ride reasonably comfortably in daily driving, rather than beating you to death over every bit of uneven pavement or expansion strip. The RX-8 delivers here in a way that is really hard to believe. This is a perfectly comfortable car for daily city driving or even long highway cruises. I have never been in a car that handles this well but still rides quite smoothly. This suspension is just fantastic.
Power: The stubby little stick is lovely, it falls to hand perfectly and has very precise, short throws. It is connected directly to the transmission. There is no shift-by-wire stuff here. This is a rear-wheel drive car with a traditional tall tunnel for the drive shaft running down the middle of the cabin. The shifter mates pretty well with a nice, smooth and fairly progressive clutch. It's not the best clutch I've ever driven (that would be the one in my old 626, actually) but it is more than servicable.
The engine is very unusual, a rotary design with no pistons. It has a very flat torque curve, without a lot of low-end torque. I would say the best way to describe the personality of this unique powerplant is a bit of Jekyll and Hyde. In daily commuting, it is very sedate and quiet, very much like any small Japanese car when running under 3,000 rpm. The engine's total displacement is a modest 1.3 liters, practically nothing, and it is competent, but nothing special when running at low speed. The difference is that 3,000 rpm is really just loafing for this engine. There is a very unusual, whirring sound that hints at something a little extra under the hood. In fact, the engine is easily twice as powerful as any conventional engine of that size. Any car that weighs just 3000 pounds and has about 240hp on tap is not going to be slow. If you drop the throttle and start stirring the pot with the stick, this thing gets down to business in a hurry. But it isn't like other sports cars, you need to really work with the car if you want to go fast. The engine demands that you keep the revs up, far above where any traditional engine would go. However, if you work the stick right and keep the revs up into the 5-6K range and higher, the car will leap from zero to sixty in just six seconds, ending up in just SECOND gear. Indeed, the engine will rev to that unbelievable 9,000 redline quite happily. Amazingly, it never gets harsh or unpleasant as the tach needle climbs. It is completely smooth all the way up. Indeed, the engine revs so high and so easily, they put a "beep" warning chime in it when you hit 9k redline and you need to upshift. Now that is pretty damn amazing! If you want to make a piston engine go around at 9000 rpm it better be in an Indy car unless you want to see parts of it blowing through the hood, so this definitely takes some getting used to.
Power delivery is generally linear, with a very flat, stable torque curve overall. But there is one wrinkle: In the rotary system, there are a total of three fuel injectors. Below about 3500 RPM it's one injector, 3500 to somewhere around 5200 RPM it's two and then from 5200 up to red-line it's all three (the third injector is deleted from automatic versions to de-tune the engine because only a manual transmission can handle the the power coming from all three injectors.) Under hard acceleration, every time a new injector comes on, it's like a turbo-charger kicking in. Keeping that second injector in play continuously with the third kicking in occasionally turns this otherwise sedate car into a real flamethrower.
If you are a skilled driver, this personality is perfect. It's calm and sedate in situations where that's all you need, while it will also jump whenever you want it to. It takes a little while to master this car's secrets, but it amply rewards those who do.
Other stuff: The xenon headlights are great. The base stereo on mine has a CD player and six speakers and is adequate but certainly not awe-inspiring. Duplicate stereo controls (including a mute button) are on the wheel, which is a great feature. There are two sets of two cupholders, but the ones in the front get in the way of comfortable shifting. On my morning commute, I end up putting my coffee cup in the back ones, which are still fairly easily reached from the front seat, although not the most convenient. (You really shouldn't be drinking coffee in a purpose-built sports car like this anyway, right?) There is a nice small center storage compartment aft of the front cup-holder with a power plug for a cell phone in it, and a second compartment just like that without a power plug for the back seats. There is also a small, lockable pass-through to the trunk from the back seats, although the seats do not fold down. The trunk is not enormous, but it is quite respectable for a car of this size. You can get a weekend worth of luggage or a full load of groceries in it with no trouble. There is no spare tire. They just give you a fix-a-flat kit.
Downsides:
Mileage. The gas mileage really stinks and it takes premium fuel. Expect mid-teens to as low as 12-13 in town and barely over 20 on the highways. It also doesn't have a very big fuel tank, so the range between fill-ups is disappointing. 200+ miles in full city driving and about 250+ on the highway.
Low-speed Highway Cruising. The highway ride is fine, but 6th gear is utterly gutless at low-end, legal highway speeds. You will find the need to downshift into 5th more than you would expect given the engine's ample power. I'm sure 6th gear was designed to squeeze as much mileage out of the engine as possible, but the result is that the car feels like a Yugo at 55mph in 6th gear, which is completely bizarre. At 65-70mph this issue goes away, but if you drive somewhere at 55mph with any regularity it will definitely annoy you.
Interior fittings. After owning the car more than a year, I found out why this car is so inexpensive for the performance it offers. They hand-build these rotary engines in a clean-room one at a time in Japan, but the car still starts out at under $30k, so there had to be something left out. Mazda definitely skimped on the quality of the interior fittings. The dashboard has developed a squeak already, one of the air vents has come loose and the center console cupholder was replaced for coming out of its track. The quality of the interior pieces, even ones that seemed solid at first, really isn't up to snuff.
A pleasant surprise has been oil consumption. Rotary engines naturally consume some oil as they work, and in the past this was something you had to keep a close eye on.
My RX-8 doesn't really eat oil at all. You probably only need to check it once between oil changes and if you change the oil every 5,000 miles as required you probably could get away without doing even that. This new design has clearly fixed the problem of eating oil that plagued earlier rotary engines.
Conclusions: After six months of daily driving and long trips, I don't regret this purchase at all. It remains a blast to drive and seeing it at the end of a long day waiting for me in the garage still brings a smile to my face. How many other things have you bought that you are still excited about owning even a year later. The downsides are mostly expected: It's an extraordinarily high performance car, and performance like this doesn't come cheap. It's a bit expensive to run because it eats gas, but no worse than even a mid-sized SUV.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 27,500
Condition: New Model Year: 2004 Model and Options: 6-Speed Sport Package
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.