The Mazda Roadpacer: A Big Luxury Car with a Little Rotary Engine

 Photo by Japanese Wikipedia user Taisyo.
I say "Mazda", you say "zoom zoom". Mazda makes a broad line of small and midsized cars and SUVs, with an emphasis on sport and driving dynamics. Perhaps their best known vehicles are their series of rotary engined sports cars. The rotary engine has been wholly confined to the RX series sports cars since about 1980, but in the 1970s Mazda slapped a rotary engine in pretty much anything that they made.

During this time, Mazda also built a luxury car, as expensive as a contemporary Cadillac Fleetwood. The Mazda Roadpacer wasn't particularly big by today's standard - my 2011 Honda Accord V6 has about the same weight - but it was huge by Mazda standards, and being sold only in 1970s Japan, it was a very large vehicle for the time and place. The Roadpacer wasn't even built by Mazda - it was a re-badged Holden Premier, a full size Australian sedan. Mazda took the Premier and fitted a 130 horsepower rotary engine and equipped the car to the gills, including automatically locking doors, a speed warning system that activated at 56 mph, an in-car Dictaphone system, and a stereo that could be controlled from front and back seats.

Produced from 1975 to 1977, only 800 cars were sold, and most were sold to Japanese government officials. Most of these 800 were crushed in later years, making the Roadpacer extremely rare. The car's failure can be attributed to various factors: the price ($10,000 at the time) and fuel consumption (9 mpg, about like a Hummer H2) in the wake of the first gas crisis. The vehicle was also slow, saddled with slow acceleration to a top speed of a tepid 103 mph.

Why would Mazda sell a slow, gas guzzling, Australian built luxury car? Competition. Japanese luxury cars only reached the USA in the late 1980s, but have been sold in Japan for as long as cars have been sold there. Toyota, Nissan, Mitsubishi, and even Isuzu had luxury models out by 1975.