Junkyard Find: 2004 Mazda RX-8

Murilee Martin
by Murilee Martin

Just about every kind of vehicle shows up at the low-priced, high-inventory-turnover self-service wrecking yards, sooner or later. It took until the late 2000s before I started seeing Mazda Miatas in such yards, and now it appears that the advance scouts for a steady flow of RX-8 s are here. I saw this silver ’04 at the same Denver-area yard that gave us the biohazardous 2009 Kia Rondo.

As you might expect, the RENESIS 13B engine and many more nice bits got snapped up within minutes of this car entering the yard’s inventory.

I reviewed the last of the RX-8s and I thought it was one of the greatest new cars I’d ever driven at the time. I was considering buying one … until I refueled it and discovered that the thing got 15 mpg highway. The original buyer of this car decided that he or she wanted terrible fuel economy and the no-torque acceleration that an automatic/Wankel combo delivers so well. How? Why?

Still, what this means is that RX-8s appearing in the 24 Hours of LeMons might dodge the billions of penalty laps they once earned. It turned out that these cars are not particularly fast in a real-world, wheel-to-wheel road race, but they should be fun for future low-budget racers.

The Japanese-market ads for this car were full of shrieking Wankels, burnouts, and utterances of the words “Zoom-zoom-zoom.”





Murilee Martin
Murilee Martin

Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.

More by Murilee Martin

Comments
Join the conversation
3 of 49 comments
  • Namesakeone Namesakeone on Dec 28, 2015

    Slightly off topic, but I read somewhere that replacing the fuel filter on the 3rd gen RX-7 required removing the rear axle. Is this true?

    • HiFlite999 HiFlite999 on Dec 29, 2015

      Nope. First, there's no rear axle. Second, it's on the fuel pump in the gas tank, reachable through a hatch in the top of the fuel tank.

  • HiFlite999 HiFlite999 on Dec 29, 2015

    As a current RX-8 owner, I'm happy to report it's just a car, not a magic carpet, but also not the devil's spawn. 1) Oil: 1 qt/1,500 miles is about right. 2) MPGs: 22-24 highway, 18-20 city, driven gently. If wound out in every gear, less; 7.9 mpg on a roadrace track. Still, I spend less on gas than insurance. 3a) How to fail the engine: Let the ignition coils go bad. (The duty cycle of the coils is far higher in a rotary, that is, the time between firings is shorter than in a normal piston engine.) This will cook and plug the cat. The plugged cat will drive exhaust temperatures too high and a seal will fail. 3b) How to fail the engine: Let the cooling system deteriorate. A single excursion above ~235 degrees F will cause enough differential expansion between the iron "centers" and the alloy housing to fail o-rings and get water into places it shouldn't go. 3c) How to fail the engine: Use 20W-50 without modding the oil pressure relief valve. This will give too-little oil flow at high rpm. (Applicable to many modern piston-engine cars too, BTW). My 110 hp RX-4 back in the day was stone-reliable. The 230 hp RX-8 engine, less so. Both had the same displacement. High hp/cc cars of any type (S2000, Ferrari, ...) run into the same sort of problems, mostly caused by ppl treating them like Camrys. Unfortunately, used RX-8s go for so little money these days that they get into the hands of kids unable to keep up with maintenance. Being cheap and/or ignorant will kill these engines in short order.

  • El scotto Oh, ye nattering nabobs of negativism! Think of countries like restaurants. Our neighbors to the north and south are almost as good and the service is fantastic. They're awfully close to being as good as the US. Oh the Europeans are interesting and quaint but you really only go there a few times a year. Gents, the US is simply the hottest restaurant in town. Have to stand in line to get in? Of course. Can you hand out bribes to get in quicker? Of course. Suppliers and employees? Only the best on a constant basis.Did I mention there is a dress code? We strictly enforce it. Don't like it? Suck it.
  • 1995 SC At least you can still get one. There isn't much for Ford folks to be happy about nowadays, but the existence of the Mustang and the fact that the lessons from back in the 90s when Ford tried to kill it and replace it with the then flavor of the day seem to have been learned (the only lessons they seem to remember) are a win not only for Ford folks but for car people in general. One day my Super Coupe will pop its headgaskets (I know it will...I read it on the Internet). I hope I will still be physically up to dropping the supercharged Terminator Cobra motor into it. in all seriousness, The Mustang is a.win for car guys.
  • Lorenzo Heh. The major powers, military or economic, set up these regulators for the smaller countries - the big guys do what they want, and always have. Are the Chinese that unaware?
  • Lorenzo The original 4-Runner, by its very name, promised something different in the future. What happened?
  • Lorenzo At my age, excitement is dangerous. one thing to note: the older models being displayed are more stylish than their current versions, and the old Subaru Forester looks more utilitarian than the current version. I thought the annual model change was dead.
Next