Mazda RX-8 owner reveals the true cost of running a rotary engine

The Mazda RX-8 has probably the world’s most famous rotary engine car.

It is also the best-selling rotary engine car, although that particular bar was never set very high.

There’s a good reason for that – because while rotary engines are fantastic to have, they’re also horrible to run.

A Mazda RX-8 owner shared the true cost of maintaining a rotary-powered vehicle, and it’s worse than you think.

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The bad and the ugly

The Mazda RX-8 owner in question is… yours truly.

Maintaining an RX-8 for about 20,000 miles required a lot of patience and a lot of money, spent in large part on oil and gas.

Most car people know that the RX-8 gobbles fuel and motor oil like Reacher drinks black coffee.

But the actual experience is – if anything – even worse.

It’s like getting a latte at a franchise coffee shop in Manhattan – you know it will be expensive, but it still hits you when you see the price and it’s a lot closer to $10 than it should be.

It was the same with the RX-8, which required an oil top-up once every 1,000 miles.

It also couldn’t do better than 13 miles-per-gallon, even when driving like a nun.

You can actually get V8-powered G-Wagens with better fuel economy than that.

Then there’s the really big problem, which is reliability.

To give you an idea of what this is really like, the below image shows the RX-8 in its natural habitat – The back of a tow truck.

My RX-8 broke down six times in the first five months, usually because the engine flooded.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, it needed new spark plugs three times in 20,000-odd miles.

By the way, even though the RX-8 only has two ‘cylinders’ – technically rotors – it actually has four spark plugs.

Which means you still have to double the cost even after halving the number of cylinders.

Is it actually any good?

Several RX-8 owners have similar horror stories to share, and there are tons of Reddit threads, YouTube videos, and forum posts to prove it.

So the question is, is the RX-8 actually any good?

The truth is, the RX-8 is terrible as a means of transport, but it’s a great car.

It’s fast, smooth, and comfortable, and it’s aged well.

This is a 20+ years old design, remember, but it still looks good on the road today.

Rotary engines, or Wankel as they’re sometimes called, are smoother than ‘normal’ engines, they also rev higher and have a better power-to-cubic capacity ratio.

The two-rotor, 1.3-liter engine in the RX-8 produces up to 238hp, depending on the model and back when it was new, every RX-8 rival needed a 3.0-liter V6 to get the same result.

It also revs like a motorcycle, nearly up to 10,000rpm, and the gearbox is pretty phenomenal, too.

You can accelerate from a standstill to 180km/h – that’s 112mph – in third gear.

Also, as an added bonus, a smaller engine means lower insurance premiums in some jurisdictions.

There’ll never be another Mazda RX-8

Mazda has teased a potential successor to the RX-8 on several occasions, including in 2023, with the SP concept – as seen above – but it didn’t happen.

To be honest, it’s very unlikely to ever happen.

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

Part of the reason for that is the rotary engine has always been considered unreliable, which is why, apart from the RX-7 and RX-8, it’s generally only used for fancy concept cars.

But with the rise of EVs, automakers aren’t sure they’re going to be able to keep ‘traditional’ internal combustion engines alive.

Never mind the wonderful, but complicated, rotary engine.