No one wanted to even touch Mazda RX-8 for devastating reason until young mechanic came along

No one wanted to have anything to do with this rotary Mazda RX-8 and its Wankel engine, and for good reason.

After being neglected by its previous owner, this RX-8 was in bad shape.

And the RX-8 has a horrible reputation to begin with, so that didn’t help either.

But then a young mechanic came along, and he managed to fix it.

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Why the Mazda RX-8 is so difficult to fix

YouTuber Herr Moritz bought a used Mazda RX-8 for peanuts, something that’s very easy to do because RX-8s age like expired milk due to the notorious unreliability of their Wankel engine.

Let’s get this out of the way right off the gate: the author of this article has owned and run a Mazda RX-8 for about 30,000 miles, so this guy’s pain is understood and shared.

The RX-8 is fast, smooth and it revs like a motorcycle thanks to its rotary engine, also known as Wankel engine, but the car’s engine is also its biggest weakness.

It has triangular rotors that rotate inside something that’s basically a cylinder, providing a far higher power-to-weight ratio than a piston engine.

This is why the RX-8 has a 1.3-liter engine but produces 237 horsepower.

Back when it was launched, in the early 2000s, most cars needed an engine twice as big to produce similar power outputs.

The problem is this engine is unreliable, it floods quite easily, and it is extremely thirsty.

And it’s not just gas it wants, it also consumes abnormal amounts of engine oil, which is the problem this YouTuber faced.

The previous owner had failed to keep up with maintenance correctly, especially with oil changes, and the engine’s components showed significant wear because of that.

This is why no one wanted to touch the engine in this car with the other end of a stick until a young mechanic stepped up.

Plot twist, the young mechanic in question is also the owner/YouTuber.

First, he took the engine apart to see how bad things looked.

The good news is only the rear housing needed replacing.

The bad news is everything else was extremely dirty, and needed to be clean.

It wasn’t easy, but he got it done.

The future of rotary engines

Mazda has teased a potential successor to the RX-8 on several occasions, including two years ago with the SP concept, but it never happened.

And to be brutally honest, it is very unlikely to happen.

The Mazda MX-30 technically uses a rotary engine, but that’s only a range extender for its electric unit, which is not at all the same thing.

The rotary engine has always been considered unreliable, which is why, apart from the RX-7 and RX-8, it has generally only been used for fancy concept cars, but not for production cars.

And now, with the rise of EVs, automakers aren’t sure they’re going to be able to keep ‘traditional’ internal combustion engines alive, let alone the wonderful, but complicated, rotary engine.