A hidden cockroach car kept Mazda's rotary engine alive into the RX-8
In the late 1990s Mazda had shelved its rotary sports car plans. A small team kept working anyway, cramming the engine into a stretched MX-5 they nicknamed the cockroach car. Their persistence won over management and produced the RX-8, a four-door rotary coupé built from 2003 to 2012.
The groundwork dates to the 1995 RX-01 concept, which carried an early version of a new side-port rotary. Money was short and buyers were turning to SUVs, so the project stalled. The skunkworks team's test mule, called gokiburi-ka in Japanese, eventually caught the attention of a management then heavily influenced by Ford, Mazda's new owner. Approval came with one condition: the car had to have four doors.
Designers in Japan, the United States and Europe competed on the styling, and the lead went to Ikuo Maeda, whose father had shaped the first RX-7. Their answer to the four-door rule was a pair of rear-hinged back doors with no pillar between front and rear; the leading edge of each rear door acts as the pillar, so those doors open only once the front ones are. The cabin fits four adults rather than two plus a pair of token seats. Production began at Hiroshima in February 2003.
The RENESIS engine displaced just 1.3 litres, and moving its exhaust ports into the side housings improved fuel economy and emissions enough to make it saleable in North America again. The manual version could rev to 9,000 rpm; automatics were detuned because no available gearbox could reliably cope with such speeds. Mounting the engine behind the front axle and the fuel tank ahead of the rear gave almost equal weight at each end, and a carbon-fibre driveshaft trimmed rotating mass.
Mazda even built a version that burned hydrogen as well as petrol, leasing it to Japanese businesses from 2006 and sending 30 to the Norwegian project HyNor in 2008. Europe dropped the car in 2010 after it failed emissions standards, and with a strong yen hurting sales elsewhere, it ended without a successor after 192,094 were built.
Source: Mazda RX-8
