Mazda RX8

A few years ago I came into a bit of back pay and started looking around for a car to buy. I had no kids and was currnetly driving an MX-5. I had a short list Alfa 147 GTA Mazda RX-8 I tried hard to get a test drive in the Alfa but could not. Mazda bent over backward and I had 3 test drives. I went for the RX-8 I knew about the poor full economy, the high oil consumption and knew about the engine flooding problems. Or so I thought. This is a review about my experience with this car both good and bad. The car I bought was the 231ps. It had a 6 speed box, traction control, stability control ...  Read the complete review

The RX8 was brought into mazda's range in around 2003, though most of these were imports until 2004. The RX8 comes in 2 variants, the 190bhp version and the 230bhp version. The latter really is the one to go for, as it offers a 6 speed gearbox and a rev range up to 9000rpm! The RX8 is based around the tried and tested Wankel rotary engine, known in this car as the Renesis engine. If you want a full explanation you should check the Mazda site, however it basically works around a piston-less design, where the engine has 2 triangular rotors which use the 4-stroke combustion. There were originally some worries about the reliability of the rotor tips, however ...  Read the complete review

This was one cool car to drive and sort of reminded me of the TV series Knight Rider which featured a sports car driven by David Haselhoff that had a built in computer which could talk to the driver. The car I took for a test drive was also jet black just like the car in the TV series. Me and a girlfriend once took this baby out for a 1 hour test drive in 2005 when it first came out although the price tag was a bit too much even on our combined salaries and trading in our existing cars. I already owned a Mazda 323 at the time. The Mazda RX8 is a successor to the RX7 and boasts a rotary engine but I won't go into technical details about it for this ...  Read the complete review