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 melange 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.
