2004 Mazda RX-8 in Chicago

Our year with the Mazda RX-8 was like spending time with young children: deeply rewarding most of the time but occasionally very frustrating and annoying.

Let's get the bad part out of the way first. The RX-8 is the first U.S.-market car to use a Wankel rotary engine since the Mazda RX-7 departed our shores after 1995. The rotary has a number of advantages over a reciprocating engine-notably its compactness, its simplicity, and the lack of moving parts that allows it to rev higher. But as with most things in life, you don't get something for nothing, and there are also a number of problems with rotary engines. First, they aren't very thermally efficient, which means they're thirsty for petrochemical products. We found the RX-8 guzzled premium gasoline at a rate of 19 mpg during its 34,305 miles with us.

Rotary engines also like to consume oil, because they use this particular hydrocarbon to lubricate rotor seals on a total-loss basis. The manual warns owners that they will need to check the oil level every couple of fill-ups, but it's odd to have to do that in this day and age-it reminded us of owning an old British sports car. It's not as if Mazda makes the task easy, either, as senior editor Joe Lorio observed: "For a car that needs such close monitoring of its oil level, its dipstick sure is buried. And should you actually need to add a quart of oil, you must first remove the engine cover. Now, that's convenient."

We probably wouldn't have cared too much about the RX-8's sheik-friendly ways, except that there was another problem.... Read full article