Brown's Alexandria Mazda

• Introduction  »
• Interior / Walk Around  »
• Driving Impressions  »
• Summary

Walk Around

The Mazda RX-8 bulges with style if not grace. It's about the most aggressive shape possible in stamped steel. From the rear it looks good, with upswept lines and wide fender flares. From the side you see big, sharp wheel arches; plus a non-functional black mesh vent angled behind the front wheel. The headlights aren't as dramatic as they might be; Mazda says it believes design should be expressed in sheet metal, not lighting.

The front and rear doors open in opposite directions, which Mazda calls the Freestyle door system. With no pillar between the doors, this allows very easy ingress and egress for the rear-seat passengers. As with similar systems in pickups, the front door must be opened before the rear door can open.

To compensate for the lack of a B-pillar, Mazda has carefully designed the structure with supporting steel crossmembers and braces, as well as reinforcements around the door perimeter for rigidity and safety against a side impact. (The RX-8 achieved four stars out of five in NHTSA side impact tests.)

Interior

2008 Mazda RX-8

The Mazda RX-8 cabin is comfortable and surprisingly roomy. The seats are great, a nice fit with good bolstering. The Sport cloth seat material wasn't as attractive to our eyes as it might have been, however.

Even large adults find the rear bucket seats in the RX-8 comfortable, with plenty of elbow room thanks to the transmission tunnel/console that separates them. Getting into and out of the rear seat is easy. Due to the high front seatbacks, rear-seat passengers can't see much out front without leaning inboard, but they can see out the side windows. The rear side windows don't roll down, but just push outward, so the back seats may not be the best place to spend long periods of time on a hot summer day.

The rear-hinged back door and the pillar-less door configuration allows loading of large, awkward items into the back seat area that simply cannot be handled by other sports cars and sedans. We were able to fit a desk stool (Swopper) and a storage crate inside, without using the front seat, a very impressive feat for a sports car. At other times, however, the counter-swinging doors were cumbersome and got in the way, just as they did on extended-cab pickups, on the Honda Element, and on the Saturn Ion Coupe; there's a reason rear-hinged doors have had limited appeal over the years.

The trunk, a true trunk, can carry two sets of golf clubs. A vertical compartment door (pass-through) opens from the trunk to the rear seat area to allow the carrying of skis and such.

The driver is treated to a stitched leather three-spoke steering wheel that we liked both for its style and feel. Also nice were the drilled aluminum pedals and the solid dead pedal. The brake pedal is designed to make rotation of your right foot easier, for heel-and-toe downshifting. Each knee is comfortably and firmly supported during hard cornering.

The instrument panel seems to sacrifice efficiency for style. There are three big rings, dominated by the 10,000-rpm tachometer in the center, with a digital speedometer readout on the tach face. We miss having a separate analog speedometer. Our feeling is that analog gauges can be interpreted at a glance, while digital readouts have to be read. The two large outside rings include gauges for water temp, fuel and oil pressure. The instruments are illuminated with indirect blue lighting.

The panel forward of the shift lever is trimmed in a combination of leather, high-quality vinyl, and glossy piano-black plastic. The stereo and climate control knobs are integrated; redundant controls are on the steering wheel spokes. The air conditioning wasn't as effective as we would have liked.

The available navigation system is DVD-based and features a dedicated, retractable seven-inch screen on top of the dash above the radio and climate controls. Controlled from an eight-button cluster located just behind the shift lever, the system is simple to operate and the interface is clear, thanks in part to the fact that it does not incorporate radio and climate controls into the screen, as do many other navigation systems.

The doors and seatbacks have ample pockets and cranny space, and four CDs can fit in the console, but there aren't a lot of cubbies up front. The soft triangular shape of the engine rotors are a design theme found throughout the interior, most noticeably in the stylish headrests and atop the shift lever.

Go to Driving Impressions