Monday morning Jalopnik...

Yeah... Seems like rotory owners use a completely different scale when they're talking about reliability

Is 78k miles supposed to be impressive?  Don't S2000s typically go for double or triple that?

Well that's hardly an impressive number then... An average of 40k for the other three cars? All season tires last longer than that.

And thats the issue right there.

Everything you listed is pretty specific things that only the rotary engine suffers from.

Used to work at a shop that had a dyno. I absolutely grew to detest the things when the rotary clubs would come in for a dyno day.

There’s taking care of cars, and then there’s arbitrary loops that make daily living with a car a pain in the ass.

Depends upon your goals and interest. The closest experience I could relate to an N/A rotary is an E30 M3, which is a very expensive, and unreliable endeavour; at least the RX-8 has a low cost of entry. The Honda S2000 is a more contemporary comparison, again at mich higher buy-in cost, and they are near equals, but…

I kept up on oil changes and fills, pre-mixed, warmed it up properly every time I drove it, took it to redline every time I drive it (critical for Wankel health), and let it cool properly before shutting it off every time.

haha when you started talking about hard wired into your CNS, I started thinking “after my RX8 I moved to an s2000 then an Elise then an exige, rx8 can’t compare” ...and then I finished reading your sentence 😆

So basically the Happy Fun Ball of cars . . .

I’ve had RX8s for the past eleven (cry) years. I race one. And, respectfully, anybody who claims ‘if you take care of it and drive it properly, it’s as reliable as the day is long!’ is not aware of the full story. Anybody who says that is operating entirely on anecdotal information.

I don’t have a clear recollection of it, but I have the sense that the RX8 wasn’t really marketed as an ‘involved’ car to own. So, you got a bunch of people buying it because of it’s styling and because it’s a Mazda, and then came the attendant complaints when said non-enthusiasts have no idea how the engine even…

It was the 2nd prettiest.  Really hard to follow the FD, tho.

It certainly wasn’t the prettiest of the RX-series, and I do wish they had designed it as a 2 seater like the original, but it was an interesting car and I came very close to buying one. 

The door is at the top right of your screen.....looks like an X

Yet an LS looks like it was meant to be in there:

ive wanted the same thing. The mazdaspeed engine was faster anyways and sounded a helluva lot better. 

I’ve been scorned for saying this but I wish that Mazda had also made this car with the Mazdaspeed turbo four. They should have figured out a way to leverage the goodness of the chassis with a conventional engine as well as the Wankel. Could have called it the MX-8.