Mazda RX-8 POV Drive - And Why You're All Wrong

I'm gonna risk sounding like a bit of a hypocrite here but the majority of videos on the Mazda rx-8 on YouTube a pretty piss-poor you kind of have two schools of four you've even got the people who bought one for five hundred pounds and have decided that it's utter or you've got the people who spent five thousand pounds on one which is absolutely perfect in every way and will tell you that it is God's gift to cars now the Mazda rx-8 is neither of those things and I think the crucial floor the majority of these videos is people try and make it something that it's not it's kind of cheap it's not as expensive to run as you think and it's kind of just designed to be a weekend car if I de quid for the amount of people that have asked me whether they make a good daily simply because they've seen that on auto trader listings it has a 1.3 engine buff what I probably be able to rebuild the engine on this one but thanks to a family friend as you shall now see that doesn't need to be done because it starts mostly turn the air con down a little bit that's another thing in a master or excite if you are gonna buy one make sure it has air conquers these get very hot make ignore the obd reader that has nothing to do with anything so I previously had a master excite pretty much exactly the same as this one it was in stormy blue with the stone interior which I much prefer to the black interiors because it's just that little bit more interesting I bought my last one really cheap with tiny mileage on it and it was brilliant I bought this one pretty cheap but with more mileage on it and it was rubbish hence it needed a new engine there in noise one of the big problems with our excites obviously if you've been living under a rock you probably won't know that these do need a bit more care than a normal car because of the rotary engine the engines in these generally tend to last anywhere between forty and a hundred thousand miles and it's a really wide spectrum depending on how they've been looked after if they aren't topped up with all and allowed to run very low on it and aren't warmed up before ragging then yeah forty thousand miles is doable I've seen them on low compression and not starting one hot at forty thousand but if you look after them people in America seem to claim that they can do over a hundred thousand miles I've yet to really see it but you know for a cheap car you kind of can factor in the cost of a rebuild which if you look in the right places coming out for just under two grand I mean some places claim you can have it done for a lot less than that but they aren't generally to be trusted now my love affair with the rotary engine is actually pretty strong because after my first rx-8 I bought a Mazda rx-7 an FD Model arguably the holy grail of JDM goodness alongside cars like the Nissan Skyline GTR and the Toyota Supra but in all honesty I didn't actually like my rx-7 that much and I actually prefer the rx-8 which is not gonna win me any favors in this video because I imagine they'll now be a thousand people going you know nothing the rx-7 is the best car in the world and I mean sure yeah if you're the kind of person who likes to be force-fed anything posted by eat sleep JD and on Facebook then yes sure the rx-7 is a very good car and it's very brilliant and it's the best car ever and it's better than a Ferrari for 5a and everything is wonderful and everything always works but in reality mine was well despite being low mileage and in really good condition it just it didn't do it for me there was something wasn't quite there like the thing I love about the rx-8 is the amount of driver engagement you get you've got a fantastic 6-speed gearbox with a snappy sneaky shift which is the exact kind of thing you want out of a sports car I never really understand why people are more than happy to drive things like Foxhall courses and peugeot there any things and Citron's on stock gear shifters when they're a hot version because they always have terrible terrible sheet change actions I mean I know that that kind of comes with the territory of a front-wheel drive car and a rear-wheel drive car obviously has a lot less of a linkage to go through but I've driven a Fiesta ST and they have a fantastic gear shift so it's not impossible but there's kind of detracting away from how good this car is I mean is it as good as an mx-5 it's difficult to say I think the mx-5 gives you a lot more of a kind of raw action whereas this is a bit more it was almost kind of designed to be a bit more comfortable but you still get a fantastic amount of engagement through the shift which is nice and the other thing I love about it is it's such a usable car in the corners you see with some mx-5 you've got to be a bit more careful because they're very light over the back end with the rx-8 you've got a lot more weight and the chassis kind of how do I it almost provokes a bit more understeer then oversteer which means that even if you're not you know the best driver in the world you can give an rx-8 a bit of stick we're having to worry about the back end catching you out straightaway don't get me wrong on a wet road it probably won't be the same I mean this one's running nangka ns2 because it's that they're the tires that it came on and quite frankly they're pitiful it was spitting with rain a couple of weeks ago and I felt like I was gonna die just open up a little bit but yeah I mean if you put good toys on it then I mean I've driven I've driven my old are excited merely with core lives as well this one's on stand suspension on track and yeah in the rain at Snetterton on a set of road stone kind of budget tires knock off nextons they were they were pretty good and you know it's it's a car that actually you can you can give a fair bit of stick to as I say without it just killing you the moment that you approach a corner now the one complaint that a lot of people had with the rx-8 was that after the rx-7 which obviously had this twin turbo rotary Mazda tried to kind of make the rotary engine conform to the new emission standards which meant the twin turbochargers had to go also for cost reasons and a naturally aspirated engine took his place now to a lot of people that is sacrilege and it's absolutely awful but the thing with a turbocharged rotary is that as much as as I noticed in the rx-7 the twin turbo system with the sequential twins had been done fantastically you know boosted would build from about 2,500 revs kind of this wage star getting the kick and it would kind of carry all the way through of this funny little kind of switchover point between the two turbos halfway through the revs I just found that it almost felt a bit artificial it almost felt like the engine wasn't meant to be a turbocharged engine and the rx-8 engines by the fact that it gets this terrible rep because of the low amount of miles that it can actually achieve and because of various other factors the fact is you can't get around the fact that it's got a nine and a half thousand red line which makes anybody with a VTEC Honda just cry when they decide to Willy wave ago who could my car I've got eight eight thousand whatever rev limiter do one can do lots of reps and then you come stomping along with your part well I've got a high redline and even less talk than you so take that it's quite a nice feeling but as I shall try and demonstrate here this has got very cheap eBay system on it and I take it slowly just make sure I get around these people people do look at you very strangely when you're wearing a GoPro on your head you just get this sound that isn't quite matched or I found wasn't quite matched by the rx-7 despite the fact that I had quite a nice khaki moto exhaust on it it just didn't do it for me you didn't get this kind of buzz in your penis at about 8,000 rpm a lady viewers I don't really know how it feels for you but James May once explained that he gets a certain phase in certain cars now the or excite I'm not going to claim it's interesting enough to give you the fizz as soon as you look at it however when you hit that beep Bay in half thousand there's nothing quite like it it feels absolutely orgasmic and okay that maybe an over-exaggeration but it's been a while so it's currently about the most interesting feeling I get in the gentlemen's area now apart from the engine and the handling the rxa is actually reasonably well carried out you've got climate control which works you've got a six CD changer which works you've got a Bose sound system which is okay as kind of standard Japanese sound systems go it's definitely not the worst and it's quite well built I mean I I've got evoke ten and I love it oh it's it's a fantastic car because you put your foot down and it just kind of goes but it doesn't really do much else than that but one of the main things I hate about that car is everything sounds badly built everything just has this air of zero quality about it and I hate it it's the doors rattle the glove box rattles the steering wheel rattles the roof lining rattles everything rattles I mean this will rattle if you're going over bumps and all except that I'll take rattles over bumps because I've had a lot of Japanese cars and trying to find one that actually has some form of sound deadening without going for a Lexus that weighs two tons is very difficult but what I can't accept is sitting on the motorway at 70 miles per hour on it just rattling for well no good reason there's no reason for a car to rattle when you're not going over bumps I don't understand it but this this is reasonably well built the doors sound pleasant when you close them they don't sound like they're going to fall off or believe their door card inside the boot when you close it even sounds somewhat okay it doesn't sound like utter trash the bonnet closes and doesn't rattle it's not soft like an mx-5 so they're actually quite well built cars and now I feel like I'm being a little bit pro rx-8 and as I said at the start of the video would end up sounding hypocritical because I complain at people who do reviews of these cars and refuse to see the bad points in terms of bad points you may have seen me try to hide my obd reader that's because an obd reader that can cancel out engine lights is one of okay know if I'm gonna try talking over that noise an obd reader that cancels engine code is probably one of the most useful things that you could have you know rx-8 because everyone goes on about the engine and yes the engines are all have to slow down for this chap the engines are kind of a limited-time item it's not like you can run them forever they will you know you'll have people who say well rotary if you look after it will last forever it annoying these it won't there's there's no real way of getting it past that kind of hundred thousand mile mark or if there is I haven't yet seen it happen but apart from the engine they love to block up their catalytic converters it is it is their absolute favorite thing to do they really don't want to have catalytic converters I'm not going to say anything about whether this one has a catalytic converter or not because this is a YouTube video going on the internet let's say it does but if you have a stock catalytic converter on these you will eventually end up finding that it is block with itself up and there's having driven them let's keep it vague without catalytic converters on the difference between one that's still going stand to cats on one that's had it removed is unbelievable if absolute night and day the the car just feel so much more free it feels a lot less tethered so that's an issue and it's not ideal it kind and wait for these sort of got though kids a lot slower than I thought that's one issue as well as that sensors they seem to chew through sensors reasonably often that's not just a personal thing a lot of form experiences seem to suggest that that is quite an issue but then when you're dealing with such hot exhaust gas temperatures I guess that's I guess that's you know occupational have area pretty I guess that's an occupational hazard really apart from engine sensors and exhaust there isn't a massive amount house that can really go horribly wrong I mean they have some people seem to have issues with them snapping they're kind of automatic light leveling because they come of Zen under standards they've got these little light leveling bars and people seem to have an issue with those breaking and the lights not leveling properly interior wise I don't think anything really goes wrong as always to keep the aircon charged up obviously you do need to top up the oil you do need to keep on top of that you do need to make sure that you're kind of reasonably regularly changing the oil as well but they take ten w4t most of the time I mean some people argue that they're better on five thirty some people argue that they're better on fifteen forty mineral it's a very wide spectrum of what people think is best for them but in general the oil is cheap and it isn't a difficult job so I don't see why that should be such an off-putting factor but to some it is but the main thing is is that I think I have more hatred for the people who do YouTube videos and buy them for you know a few hundred quid and just a just complain constantly that they're not starting properly or you know things like that because it gives the car a bad reputation that it doesn't really deserve I mean if you go out and buy one for 500 pounds especially if you got about 192 4 500 pounds with a four port engine then you're not gonna have the best experience they come with a lot less on them the engine is a bit talk here but less powerful and people seem to formulate these opinions that oh yes well I had this 192 and I bought it for 500 pounds and it stopped working so I'm going to make a youtube video denouncing the rx-8 and saying oh yeah this is rubbish and nobody should buy one but really overall spend your money wisely do your research and it's not a bad car and I mean you know consider the fact that I paid 1200 for this one and 1200 for another one with some tasty bits and a nice engine and all in all the car owes me just under two and a half grand which isn't a lot of money for a sports car I mean you're a long way off of 350 s out there and to be honest at half the price you're not getting off the performance and you've also got the advantage of well this and what more could you want out of a sports car then to make you feel good

Channel: Garage of Luke

Views: 63,792

Rating: 4.9361024 out of 5

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Id: 9sLJqialL1k

Length: 15min 48sec (948 seconds)

Published: Thu May 21 2020