Sitting here watching baseball reading a sales report for mazda 8s and was wondering,Are rotaries cheaper to make then piston engines?Simple logic tells me it would be.Just kinda curious if it allowed mazda to upgrade interior handleing ect by saying money on the rotary.Any thoughts?

 

i remember from way back long ago, probably around march or so, there was a mention that the rx-8 is expensive to build, and the renesis is also relatively expensive to build, compared to say...the duratec v6. they are hand assembled after all.

do we even keep posts that old? :P

 

What the original poster said is true. I remember reading that the Renesis is cheaper to produce than any of the 6 cylinders that Mazda produces. I'm not sure about the 4 bangers though.

 

What exactly is the latest on sales numbers? I haven't seen anything lately on them.

 

either dealers have more in or demand is down

 

I'd have to disagree - I don't know where you read this, but it's not true. Sure, the Renesis has fewer moving parts, so raw component cost is less - but machining the housings is very expensive, and the engines are all hand assembled in Japan. That's much more expensive than the robot assembly used for almost all piston engine production, and is the real limiting factor in Renesis production volumes - that's why you won't see a Renesis in a lower-cost vehicle like a Miata, for example.

In the 70s, Japanese labour was dirt cheap, and hand-assembling rotaries for RX-2s, 3s, 4s, etc. was no big deal. There's no way that Mazda could afford to produce large volumes of rotary engines for low-cost vehicles like that currently.

Regards,
Gordon

 

Plus somehow someone has to pay for all the R&D for the car.

 

I don't think that I read it anywhere, but that I saw it on one of the various rotary "specials" on TV. I would tend to believe the fact.

Remember, not only do they have to pay for componentry, but also the man hours for putting together the motor. They have, what? Three guys making the Renesis?

 

There has to be more than 3 guys!

Mazda has said they intend to ship 30,000 RX-8's in the first year.

If it was 3 guys they must move at warp speed.

Assuming these guys work 40 hour, 5 day weeks, and take 3 weeks off a year, we get:

48 weeks x 40 hours = 1920 hours per man.
Times 3 guys = 5,760 hours.
5,760 / 30,000 = .192 hours per engine.

I doubt those 3 men can build an engine every 11 minutes or better!

 

The hand building should not drive up the cost all that much.

If we assume there are 30 guys building engines on the line:
30,000 engines a year.
30 guys
1,000 engines per builder, per year.

Let's say these are expensive employees, and cost the company $100,000 a year per man

30 x 100,000 = $3,000,000 in labour.

That is about $100 labour per engine.

Also, if we look at the alternative of machine built engines.
What would the machinery cost?
I do not know how much, but i am sure it is not cheap equipment!

And they sell an engine for how much?

I believe a replacement engine sells for around $5,000 at the dealers.

 

canzoomer knows his stuff

 

In an anterview with one of the mazda designers I belive he said the miata could not get the Renesis, because it would drive up the cost of the car by $3000 (for the engine)

 

That's bs if you were ask me. There is no way it costs 3k more for the rotary. For instance, a replacement for the 99 Miata engine, whatever is is, is about 5k. That number is directly from their forums, on severla posts. Sounds like a familiar number, eh?

 

Obviously there is a lot more to pricing than just the raw production costs.

Let's compare the RX-7 to the RX-8

When they stopped selling the 3rd gen RX-7 turbos in North America ( 1995 I believe) the stated reason was that the price point had become too high, and as it was an expensive car to build.. yaddah..yaddah..
They were selling these 3rd gens for $37,800 list back in 1995
Based on the inflation rates in the USA over the past few years this is about $45,000 in todays dollars.

So, now here we are with the 2004 RX-8.
Same rotary engine, still has some aluminum body parts, way more trick expensive toys like HID headlights, air conditioning, leather, and so on.
I just paid $42,000 Canadian for mine, which is a GT with all the toys except the moon roof and the NAV.
That is about $31,000 US.
A base Sport model can be had for around $28K

Go figure!

Sources:
Inflation rates:
http://www.westegg.com/inflation/
http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/bu2/inflateCPI.html

Price of 1995 Mazda RX-7:
http://www.epinions.com/auto_Make-19...ay_~full_specs

 

Hi Canzoomer,

The real reason for the last RX-7's demise was economics and emissions. While the quoting of US inflation prices is interesting, note that the real reason for the high price of the last RX-7 (and other Japanese sports cars) was the exchange rate between the dollar and yen.

While the 70s and 80s exchange rates were extremely favorable for Japan made vehicles, the 90s were a different story. With the higher prices, the RX-7s, Zs, and Supras simply became less attractive for their cost. By the end, Enough people weren't buying the Japanese sportscars to make it worth all the hassle of passing all of the US regulations and importing them.

The new EPA emissions regulations that were put into place in 1996 were the last straws on the camels back.

1990 Clean Air Act tailpipe emissions standards
............. HC ..... CO ..... NOx
Tier 2 .... .41 .... 3.4 .... 1.0

1996 Tailpipe emissions standards
............. HC ..... CO ..... NOx
Tier 2 .... .25 .... 3.4 .... 0.4

Even if Mazda could engineer the FD3S to meet the new standards, it was simply not worth it.

To get back to the topic a little bit, I have read before that the Renesis is similar in cost to 6 cylinder engines for Mazda.

The "Rotary Redux" article by Roger Schreffler (Mar 1, 2002) mentioned the below about the Renesis cost:

"...Mazda expects to produce the car's Renesis (name derived from “rotary” and “genesis”) rotary engine for around $2,000..."

"Predicated on monthly output of 5,000 units, the company says, amazingly, that Renesis' cost is slightly less than it would pay for a standard V-6 engine."

I've read other sources that say the renesis costs slightly more than a 6 cylinder engine.

Brian

 

I hate to inject accounting into this, but corporate economics and standard accounting methods make equipment much cheaper than manpower, holding all other variables neutral (but, of course, we don't have numbers for all the other variables, so we can only really guess). Corporations can depreciate the value of equipment over time, so if they depreciate the equipment on normalized schedule, they are "paying" less for the equipment each year due to inflation, even though they depreciate the same dollar amount each year. Employee costs tend to rise with inflation and cost of living, becoming more expensive each year.

 

I don't know how long posts stay on the Forum, but earlier this year there was a video of a guy at Mazda assembling a Renesis engine, it was quick. Maybe someone can dig up that link. IMO, It appeared much easier and faster than any piston engine would be to assemble, manually or automated.

 

Now THAT would be cool and interesting... I'm off to the search page!

 

Here's the link I found:

Renesis factory video

 

BTW, here's the original thread

Some good discussion similar to what we've been talking about on this thread

 

Cost all depends on how long that it takes to build the engine compared to time allowed to build the engine. There is usually alot of waste in the assembly process (the whole vehicle) when production first starts. So if the people building the engine get more time than it actually needs, that will drive the cost up.

 

This is just a theory but here it goes:

Mazda is the only large scale producer of the rotary type engines. They hold a monopoly on it. Mazda could charge whatever they felt like, because rotary enthusiest would have no other option other than to buy from Mazda, or unless they went the piston route. I believe the cost of production could be lowered if mazda wanted to, but why would they? They'll be the ones losing profit.

 

And here is counterpoint:

Mazda tried that with the RX-7 3rd gens. They jacked up the price over the 2nd gen by half, and sold very few cars. And in 1995 they stopped importing them to N. America.

 

Hi Tronic,

Your opinion does not seem thought out completely. Are you stating that you believe that companies lose profit when they lower production costs?

There are other very simple economic reasons why the last gen RX-7 became too expensive. There doesn't seem to be a reason to have to resort to conspiracy theories to explain things here?

Brian

 

Hi Canzoomer,

I'm not sure if you read my earlier posts on this thread but the main reason why the 3rd gen RX-7 became too expensive is because of the varying Yen-Dollar exchange rates.

The 1985 exchange rate was 238 yen/dollar while the 1995 exchange rate dropped to about 94 yen/dollar. This had a huge effect on the US prices of all of the Japanese exports and we saw the end of the Z, the Supra and the RX-7. The volatility of the exchange rates is a major reason why many of the Japanese automakers pushed harder to build more plants in other countries.

Brian