May 26, 2004 E-mail story Print


RUMBLE SEAT / DAN NEIL
It'll make your head spin
Driving Mazda's sporty, rotary-powered RX-8 is a blast, but enter that back seat at your own risk.

By Dan Neil, Times Staff Writer


The four-seat Mazda RX-8 offers unprecedented opportunities to make your loved ones woozy.

The "Rx" is a prescription-strength emetic for anybody in the rear seats when this fervid little coupe is in full thrash mode. The back seat — though surprisingly roomy and accessible thanks to the car's fascinating demi-doors — ranks up there with the aft cabin of a Porsche 911 coupe on the "are-we-there-yet" list. I spent half an hour in the RX-8's steerage compartment and was left clinging to the smoky glass like one of those Garfield dolls.

So, with all due respect to the paradigm floggers who created what is indisputably a four-seat sports car, I must tell you: The driver's seat is the place to be.

At first blush, the RX-8's mission statement — a successor to the sublime RX-7, only with two more seats and two fewer turbochargers — might seem as unpromising as conflict resolution counseling in Fallouja. But the RX-8 design has seasoned well over its nearly decade-long development (the car was largely designed at the Mazda Design Studio in Irvine). It is, first of all, a wonderful example of space efficiency. The new Renesis engine is lighter and more compact than the RX-7's twin-turbo whirligig, allowing it to be situated lower and farther back, for a lower center of gravity and lower polar inertia (it changes direction more quickly). Mazda calls this a front-midship layout. So does Nissan. Ahoy, jargon.

The design situates all the heavy stuff — cabin, engine and transmission, gas tank and the steel cat's cradle that reinforces the extra-large door openings — between the axles and divvies the weight of the car (3,029 pounds in the six-speed manual) evenly between the front and rear axles for a 50/50 weight balance. These sums get thrown off quite a bit, however, if you load the RX-8 to its capacity with two golf bags in the trunk and two overfed golf buddies in the rear seats. That's a lot of kippers to pack in a can just more than 174 inches in length.

The clean and technical exterior styling sends all the right signals. The alloy wheels twirl inside prominent, perfect-circle wheel arches seemingly laser-cut into the body and fused together by a strong character line in the lower body. The shoulder line slopes forward like the lines of a recumbent bike while the greenhouse is low and narrow. With its laughing-android face and bobbed butt, the RX-8 is somewhere between fierce and winsome, but it clearly has a visual valence to the asphalt beneath it, a look that defines the car as a high-energy surface-skimmer.

The design conceals the cut-lines around the rear doors so that from a distance you might not even distinguish it from a typical sport coupe. Like Saturn's third door design, the RX-8's rear-hinged "freestyle" doors — it sounds better than "suicide" — can be opened only after the front doors are open. Latches at the top and bottom of the back doors rotate the interlocking pins that secure the doors to the frame and act as part of the door system's anti-intrusion design. The trailing edges of the front doors are reinforced with a vertical side-impact safety bar.

The car seems to fold around you as you alight in the deep-socket driver's seat. The high shoulder line and the low floor create an ergonomic space like that of a race boat cockpit, where you're buried up to your chin in machinery. Thanks to a compact motor, the hood slopes away for good forward visibility. In the rear seats, however, the visibility is quite limited — so it's hard to lock your eyes on the horizon for vestibular relief. Mazda would probably say the seats are for occasional use. That occasion is hurling.

It would be a shame to despoil the car's lovely, lacquered interior. The seats, door gussets and steering wheel are stitched in contrasting leathers while polished alloys on the pedals, instrument console and shifter imbue the cabin with Photoshop-quality highlights. The instrument lighting changes from blue to red when the lights are switched on (a little bit of sport-tuner sizzle come to the mass market). I'm not mad about the mιlange of audio and climate controls in the central stack, however, and the plastic that is supposed to pass for piano-black is a few lumens too glossy to be believed. Still, it's a sweet piece of automotive cabinetry.

In motion, the rear-drive RX-8 has the frictionless agility and Beretta lightness of an oversized Miata. The chassis is stiffer than a soap-opera exit line. The electric-assist steering is heavy, taut and reactive. As you drive the car hard you grow increasingly sure of where the limits are and how far you can exceed them before reeling the car back in. The disc brakes come on like retro-rockets, and the pedal feels finely modulated. As with the Miata, confidence is standard equipment.

Even though the rotary engine, with its inherent lack of internal inertia, doesn't require a lot of heel-and-toe downshifting, car guys will want to keep in practice. The pedals are small and perfectly placed so you can cover the throttle and brake with the right foot.

Out there in the g-loading zone, it's plain that the car's weight under-taxes the 18-inch Bridgestone tires. Our test car had Silas Marner's own grip on the asphalt. The car has a modest degree of factory-installed understeer — the tendency to resist turning inputs near the limits of grip — that your local tuning shop could dial out in about an hour. And while it's possible to waggle the rear end loose by chopping the throttle at the entrance to a corner, the relative lack of horseflesh makes it hard to rotate the car under power. You could, if you were feeling generous, credit the limited-slip differential, which is designed to stop wheel slippage during a turn.

This is where it all gets a bit sticky for the RX-8. The signature piece in the car is the rotary engine, which produces most of its 238 horsepower in the stratosphere (8,500 rpm). With its divergent lines on the dynamometer (the 159 pound-feet of torque peaks at 5,500 rpm) the RX-8 requires you to stir the stubby shifter like witches at the caldron in "Macbeth."

And even though the "high-power" rotary is smoother than Tony Blair in the House of Commons, I felt a little — what's the word, guilty? — tormenting the throttle. One simply cannot make a stately progress away from a stoplight. You have to hit the buzzer to get moving before an MTA bus runs you down.

Mazda offers an alternative: an RX-8 with a four-speed automatic and a detuned version of the Renesis reactor (197 horsepower), packaged with smaller wheels and tires, brakes, and various other short-sheeting for a base price of $25,180. I don't think this car can give up that kind of power and still remain faithful to the creed.

Agile? Compared to the RX-8, bumblebees have wings of clay. Clever? Getting four proper seats between a 106.4-inch wheelbase ought to earn Mazda the Nobel Prize for packaging. Fun? More than a roomful of circus seals. Fast? Can we go back to "fun" again?

The RX-8 offers everything but big sports car power, which is easy to forgive except if you take the car to be a true replacement for the RX-7. It isn't, not without turbocharging, which may or may not be in the offing. And because the rotary engine design isn't particularly fuel efficient, the RX-8 gets only average gas mileage — a bit less, actually, than a pushrod GM V-6 of comparable output.

These days, that's enough to put you off your lunch.

*

2004 Mazda RX-8

Wheelbase: 106.4 inches

Length: 174.3 inches

Curb weight: 3,029 pounds

Powertrain: Naturally aspirated 1.3-liter rotary engine, six-speed manual transmission, rear-wheel drive.

Horsepower: 238 at 8,500 rpm

Acceleration: 0 to 60 mph in 6.3 seconds

EPA rating: 18 miles per gallon city, 24 mpg highway

Price, base: $26,680*

Price, as tested: $33,734 ($520 destination)

*$25,180 with four-speed automatic



Source: Mazda, Car and Driver magazine

*

Automotive critic Dan Neil can be reached at dan.neil@latimes.com.

 

Here is one on the rotary itself...

May 26, 2004

PERSPECTIVE
Rotary engine: Wankel's impossibly logical design

By Dan Neil, Times Staff Writer


Every few weeks I receive word at the office that some tinkering genius has revolutionized the internal-combustion engine. These notices arrive on pages still smelling of Damascus lightning, and promise not merely improved efficiency or reduced emissions but a kind of salvation — an end to pollution, an end to foreign oil, an end to the petty tyranny of thermodynamics.

In Greek drama, such a device was called a deus ex machina.

The latest and strangest came a few weeks ago from inventor Ronald R. Meritt, who was tendering his International Pollution-Free Alternative Fuel Motor Conversion Kit on EBay. Meritt claims the technology will allow any internal-combustion engine to run on any gas or liquid, even water. Which prompts the question: What about Kool-Aid?

Undeniably, the four-stroke, reciprocating-piston gasoline engine is inefficient: About 65% of the energy in gasoline is lost as heat in a typical car engine. The design is also inelegant: 13% of fuel energy is consumed by internal friction and pumping losses due to the furious, almost comic flailing about of the internal parts.

No wonder so many starry-eyed grease monkeys have thought there must be a better way.

Felix Wankel was one of these. Wankel invented the rotary engine that has become Mazda's signature technology. The new RX-8 sport coupe is the only car on the market to have this power plant (Mazda's other products have piston engines).

But the rotary had to come a long way to be here. Its presence under the hood is a testament to Mazda's strange faith in what was always a reluctant piece of engineering.

In the summer of 1919, in Lahr, in southwestern Germany, Wankel, then 17, had a dream about a car with a new type of engine, "half-turbine, half-reciprocating." His dream engine would eliminate James Watt's rod-and-crank connection between piston and wheel; it would eliminate the energy-sapping to-and-fro of the reciprocating pistons. Wankel's engine would whirl like Ptolemy's universe, each part harmonious with the next.

The design the young inventor eventually settled on featured a triangular rotor spinning inside a chamber shaped like a peanut (an "epitrochoid"). As the rotor turned like a spirograph stencil, the spaces inside the chamber would expand and compress, creating the pumping action needed for internal combustion. The fuel-air mixture would be sucked into the chamber by the spinning rotor; once inside, the fuel-air charge would be squeezed between the rotor and the chamber wall, where it would be ignited by spark plugs; the force of combustion would drive the rotor clockwise and the spent gases would be chased out through an exhaust port.

Such an engine would be lighter and more compact. It would be simpler, without the kinetic daisy chain of cams, pushrods, rocker arms, springs and valves; smoother and quieter, with neither the thudding pistons nor clattering valve train to create a stir under the hood; and more durable.

In 1933, when Wankel applied for his first patent, his design must have seemed every bit as weird and Salvationist as Meritt's horsepower by hydrotherapy. But four decades after his midsummer dream, in 1959, Wankel — with his industrial partner, the German motorcycle company NSU — announced the commercialized version of the Wankel rotary engine. Wankel went on to become very wealthy. The self-taught engineer was given an honorary doctorate by Munich's Technical University in 1969. Professor Wankel never held a driver's license.



It took the Mazda Motor Corp. another eight years of frantic development before it began selling cars with its twin-rotor 10A engine. When the R100 came to America in 1970, the motor produced a stunning 110 hp out of a little less than 1,000 cc's of displacement; only a few of the world's best piston engines hit the 100 hp-per-liter mark today.

But then there was a problem: emissions. The conventional Wankel engine, like a two-stroke piston motor, is a pretty smoky device; in both engines the combustion charge — the puff of gas-air fire — is chased out before fuel has a chance to burn completely. To pass the emissions standards of the Muskie Act of 1970, Mazda retrofitted a "thermal reactor" to its R100 cars. This was rather like a glow plug in the exhaust manifold that helped ignite fugitive hydrocarbons.

The fact is the Wankel engine had any number of liabilities that might have proved fatal but for the warrior determination of Mazda's engineering department. In the next decade, the company struggled to raise fuel economy and lower emissions. For a while the entire company hung on the outcome. Another problem was the engine's relative lack of torque — a function of displacement, regardless of engine design. The company's experiment in rotary-powered pickups proved short-lived (1973-1977) and ill-advised.

In 1985, Mazda introduced the 1.3-liter 13B rotary engine, which used a passive supercharging system: the staccato pressure waves from the exhaust were diverted to help force-feed the engine intake. This was the motor in the beloved first-generation RX-7 (1978-1985), the car that put Mazda on the sports car map in the United States. Turbochargers were added to the next two generations of RX-7s. Yet, even boosted to the gills, the last generation of the RX-7 only put out 255 horsepower and 217 pound-feet of torque.

The positive attributes of these little motors — low mass, high specific power (horsepower vs. size) — aren't necessarily a perfect fit for a road car. In a race car, however, rotary power is a beautiful thing. In its time, the RX-7 dominated the GTU class in International Motor Sports Assn. road racing. The 1980s-vintage RX-7s still win in Sports Car Club of America Improved Touring class, where the car's light weight and freaky durability have made it a perennial favorite. Aging 13B motors, virtually maintenance-free, still power Formula Mazda open-wheel cars.

In 1991, after years of trial and disappointment, Mazda won the 24 Hours of Le Mans. In the midship of the 787B racer was a four-rotor, twin-turbocharged rotary engine that wouldn't be denied.



The previous generation RX-7 (1998-2002) was one of my favorite sports cars, an asphalt jet ski, as glossy and sleek as Murano glass. Though it didn't have the knockout torque of a Chevy Corvette or Toyota Supra Turbo, once the 2,800-pound coupe was on the ***** of its feet, it danced like Ali. Few road cars ever had its effortless athleticism and grace.

But no amount of massaging would enable its twin-turbo 13B motor to pass rising emissions standards in California and Europe. The biggest problem dated back to Wankel's time: The intake and exhaust ports were located along the perimeter of the housing, causing "overlap"; that is, the intake port was open before the exhaust port was fully closed. Some of the fuel-air mixture escaped, unburned, out the exhaust port.

The new Renesis engine relocates the ports in the sidewall of the chamber. These ports are enlarged for better airflow. Much as high-tech piston engines modulate engine breathing with variable-valve timing and lift, the Renesis employs a curious array of three-stage fuel injectors, four-stage sequential induction and other measures to improve pumping efficiency over a range of engine speeds.

Meanwhile, the rotary engine's strained and blatty exhaust note — which always sounded to me like a conch shell trumpet — is transformed into a husky growl, thanks to various resonators and silencers.

The Renesis now meets California's LEV II and Euro 4 standards. In the new RX-8, the high-power Renesis produces 237 hp at 8,500 rpm — ultrasonic toothbrush range — and 159 pound-feet of torque.

But these are not impressive numbers, and are easily superceded by piston engines only marginally larger and heavier. The Renesis output is actually lower than the engine it replaces. And although the project costs are impossible to know, the Renesis engine must have been horribly expensive to develop to its current state of tune.

Reasonable people may ask, why bother? Why would Mazda continue to exert its intellect on a troublesome engine that has to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century?

It goes beyond torque curves and emissions. Engine designs have a gravity all their own for car companies, quite apart from the machinery. Chrysler has its Hemi, Chevy has its small-block V8, Porsche its flat-6. In an overcrowded, look-alike market, the rotary engine is where the soul of Mazda resides.

But I think it goes even beyond brand equity. For any engineer who has mused on the odd, duck-walking kinematics of a piston engine, the rotary must seem such an elegant solution, so narcotic in its simplicity, spiraling seductively like a hypnotist's wheel.

Wankel was only the first to fall under its spell.

 

I like this writer.

Comedy Gold:

 

This guy needs to consult an otolaryngologist. I've ridden in the back seat for a couple of hours at a stretch and I've had 3 or 4 other people do the same. Nobody complained of motion sickness. There is an adequate view out the front for getting your "horizon fix".

Interesting style though. He gives Dennis Miller a run for his money.

 

Very nice write ups. I did however find that his info on the Mazda 787B Lemans winning car was incorrect. The car was not turbocharged as per his info but infact was normaly asperated.

Mazda 787B Lemans

Great article none the less. Thanks for finding it.

 

I liked the articles, too. I noted a few other errors (e.g., the wrong U.S. production years for the FD RX-7; and the fact that the first RX-7 was a 12A, not a 13B), but so what; it's great to spread the word.

And I have to disagree about the RX-8 not being fast. It may not be as "quick" as some of the world's great cars (but quicker than most cars on earth), but it's damn fast.

 

The author was probably referring to the JDM FD produced from 1998 to 2002 which had a more powerful powerplant (my FD will be getting its new twins in that spec eventually) and was definitely improved over the FDs we got. The Aussies got those production years as well--lucky bastards. It is interesting that he got the SA and FB production years basically right, but didn't mention the 12A, and he mentioned 13B production began in 85. The 12A is a great engine, not one that should be forgotten.
Good articles overall. Actually a friend of mine who had to sit in my back seats for a long trip got a little sick. Most people haven't had a problem with the rear seats though.

 

In his article "Rotary engine: Wankel's impossibly logical design" Dan Neil described inventor Wankel as settling on a design where "the rotor turned like a spirograph stencil". This is blatently wrong, Wankel settled on the DKM design which had the rotor spinning on a stationary bearing, and a spinning troichoid housing, both spinning concentrically, NO spirograph motion. There were problems, but a DKM prototype was tested at 25,000 RPM. It was Froede at NSU that flipped the engine to its current configuration with the spirograph motion. Initially Wankel was pissed; he has been quoted as saying "you made a cart horse out of my race horse".

No doubt Dan Neil can turn a pretty phrase, but it is clear that they don't give Pulitzers out for accuracy.

Hans Conser

 

A little too much reaching for the cute turn of phrase to suit me, especially with so many errors left in. In addition to the ones already pointed out, it's "polar MOMENT of intertia".

Still, a positive piece, written for a much wider audience than the enthusiast press, even if I do disagree about the back seat comments. And if someone's in the back seat of any sportscar that's being thrashed, the driver deserves to sponge vomit off the leather at the end of the day.