Category: Affordable Sports 
Price Range: No data available
Unusual concept, smooth engine, good comfort, lots of fun to drive, room for four and their luggage, great value
Fuel costs, carbon dioxide emissions, not much else
Mazda takes the bold step of bringing a four-door rotary engined coupe to the market and gets it spot-on - the RX-8's superb.
Though it's ostensibly a sporting car, the RX-8 is a comfortable place to spend time. Its ride is not as firm as similarly priced Japanese sports coupes like the Toyota Celica, and it's easily as comfortable as Audi's TT. The RX-8's seats offer good support, and prove comfortable over long distances, too; the driver's seat adjusts electrically, but its winged backrest can impede use of the gearlever a little. There's automatic climate control and all controls are manageably light. The RX-8's rear doors offer a novel and very effective solution to the access problems of your average coupe. They don't open unless the front doors are open, and then the front seats slide forward to ease access to the rear seats (with the front seat seatbelts sliding out of the way on rails). Annoyingly, the front seats do not return to their original positions once folded, however. Those two rear seats are comfy and spacious enough for adults, but anyone over six feet tall may feel a little cramped. They're heavily sculpted and there's no centre-rear seat because of the big transmission tunnel. There's plenty of room in the front too, and although the short rear overhang means that the boot's quite short, there's no spare wheel (a get-me-home can instead), so it has a volume of 290 litres that's fairly useable. Bose was called in to develop the sound system on the RX-8 and the resulting nine-speaker, six-CD system is very good indeed. It adjusts its sound, rather than just the volume, as speed builds or interior noise changes due to road surface/weather conditions and so on. Satellite-navigation is available as an option, with a flush-mounted screen when not in use, rising electrically. Its controls are a little easy to accidentally knock with an arm resting on the central transmission tunnel, however.
