New-To-Me 2006 Grand Touring
11-22-2011, 09:35 AM
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New-To-Me 2006 Grand Touring
I’m new to the club, so thought I’d introduce myself and share my RX-8 story.
My ’04 Mazda6s 5 Door’s automatic transmission started to go south about a month ago, and my wife and I decided to get a new car rather than pour $3000+ into a car with 135K miles. So the search began.
We looked at Accords, another Mazda6, Mazda3, Camry, Civic, and I talked her into considering an RX-8. After all, I just need it to drive to and from work 90% of the time, and it’s got enough room to haul one or two of our kids every now and again. Criteria were that the car had to have leather, manual transmission, less than 60K miles, and be ~2005 or later model year. I researched all these cars for a couple weeks on autotrader, craigslist, cars.com, carmax, searchtempest, local dealers – you name it. After a while, the data was more than I could handle, so I created a scatterplot to make sense of it. Only cars that met our criteria made it on the chart at all. Y axis was mileage, X axis was price. The idea was that cars on the bottom left would be the cheapest with the lowest mileage, upper right would be higher mileage and higher price. Accords / Camry’s all congregated on the upper right hand corner, Mazda6’s were a bit lower on both axes, and RX-8’s were all over the place.
I kept searching for a few days and a 2006 RX-8 GT appeared on AutoTrader with 53K for $12,000. It met all the criteria: 6 Speed, Black Leather, <60K, 2006 model year. And it was in Denver. We live in Houston. I added it to the scatterplot with added cost for estimated airfare and gas to bring it home, and it was below and to the left of all the other cars. Sweet!
I called the dealership (Land Rover Denver South) and spoke to Adam. We agreed on a price, and I told him I’d fly out the next day to pick it up. Note – if you ever have the opportunity to do business with this dealership, I highly recommend Adam – he was awesome. My dad and I bought some cheap tickets on Southwest and flew out to pick it up. We’d planned to arrive at 3:45 pm, have someone from the dealership pick us up, head to the dealership to sign paperwork, and get in a few hours driving before finding a hotel for the night. Flight delay, altitude computer problem, re-board onto a new plane, etc – we didn’t arrive in Denver until ~8:45 pm local time / 9:45 pm Houston time. Adam picked us up from the airport in my new RX-8 and we drove to a gas station to fill out the paperwork, which he had prepared earlier in the day.
I checked the oil – a little low, so I added ¾ of a quart of 5W-30 (Dino). The gas station didn’t have 5W-20, and I’d read a bit of the oil debate here, so knew that it wouldn’t make the engine explode or anything. We only made it to Colorado Springs that night, but woke up early the next day to hit the road. A few things are worth mentioning from the drive:
1. This car is REALLY comfortable on road trips. We drove for 18 hours with stops every 3-4 hours to fill up / eat / pee, and didn’t feel the least bit fatigued when we arrived at around midnight that night.
2. Tumbleweeds indigenous to the Texas Panhandle were trained by Chuck Norris.
3. MPG was pretty good – we averaged 21 over about 950 miles of highway driving. From what I've read here, that's a good indication that my engine is pretty healthy.
4. New Mexico’s Department of Transportation (DPS?) sucks. I can see straight for 2 miles, and there isn’t another soul in sight, but they reduce the speed limit to 55 mph and plaster “Fines Double” signs every 5 feet.
5. The built in beep at 8K RPM is awesome.
Anyway, I couldn’t be happier with my new daily driver. I’m constantly amazed that this car is as loaded as it is and was still so much cheaper than comparable Accords & Camry’s. Thanks to everyone on the forum for some great information and for dispelling a lot of the misinformation out there. I’m looking forward to getting to know my ‘8 really well and hopefully keeping it until 200,000 miles or more.
My ’04 Mazda6s 5 Door’s automatic transmission started to go south about a month ago, and my wife and I decided to get a new car rather than pour $3000+ into a car with 135K miles. So the search began.
We looked at Accords, another Mazda6, Mazda3, Camry, Civic, and I talked her into considering an RX-8. After all, I just need it to drive to and from work 90% of the time, and it’s got enough room to haul one or two of our kids every now and again. Criteria were that the car had to have leather, manual transmission, less than 60K miles, and be ~2005 or later model year. I researched all these cars for a couple weeks on autotrader, craigslist, cars.com, carmax, searchtempest, local dealers – you name it. After a while, the data was more than I could handle, so I created a scatterplot to make sense of it. Only cars that met our criteria made it on the chart at all. Y axis was mileage, X axis was price. The idea was that cars on the bottom left would be the cheapest with the lowest mileage, upper right would be higher mileage and higher price. Accords / Camry’s all congregated on the upper right hand corner, Mazda6’s were a bit lower on both axes, and RX-8’s were all over the place.
I kept searching for a few days and a 2006 RX-8 GT appeared on AutoTrader with 53K for $12,000. It met all the criteria: 6 Speed, Black Leather, <60K, 2006 model year. And it was in Denver. We live in Houston. I added it to the scatterplot with added cost for estimated airfare and gas to bring it home, and it was below and to the left of all the other cars. Sweet!
I called the dealership (Land Rover Denver South) and spoke to Adam. We agreed on a price, and I told him I’d fly out the next day to pick it up. Note – if you ever have the opportunity to do business with this dealership, I highly recommend Adam – he was awesome. My dad and I bought some cheap tickets on Southwest and flew out to pick it up. We’d planned to arrive at 3:45 pm, have someone from the dealership pick us up, head to the dealership to sign paperwork, and get in a few hours driving before finding a hotel for the night. Flight delay, altitude computer problem, re-board onto a new plane, etc – we didn’t arrive in Denver until ~8:45 pm local time / 9:45 pm Houston time. Adam picked us up from the airport in my new RX-8 and we drove to a gas station to fill out the paperwork, which he had prepared earlier in the day.
I checked the oil – a little low, so I added ¾ of a quart of 5W-30 (Dino). The gas station didn’t have 5W-20, and I’d read a bit of the oil debate here, so knew that it wouldn’t make the engine explode or anything. We only made it to Colorado Springs that night, but woke up early the next day to hit the road. A few things are worth mentioning from the drive:
1. This car is REALLY comfortable on road trips. We drove for 18 hours with stops every 3-4 hours to fill up / eat / pee, and didn’t feel the least bit fatigued when we arrived at around midnight that night.
2. Tumbleweeds indigenous to the Texas Panhandle were trained by Chuck Norris.
3. MPG was pretty good – we averaged 21 over about 950 miles of highway driving. From what I've read here, that's a good indication that my engine is pretty healthy.
4. New Mexico’s Department of Transportation (DPS?) sucks. I can see straight for 2 miles, and there isn’t another soul in sight, but they reduce the speed limit to 55 mph and plaster “Fines Double” signs every 5 feet.
5. The built in beep at 8K RPM is awesome.
Anyway, I couldn’t be happier with my new daily driver. I’m constantly amazed that this car is as loaded as it is and was still so much cheaper than comparable Accords & Camry’s. Thanks to everyone on the forum for some great information and for dispelling a lot of the misinformation out there. I’m looking forward to getting to know my ‘8 really well and hopefully keeping it until 200,000 miles or more.
11-22-2011, 10:06 AM
#3
SARX Legend
iTrader: (46)
Welcome aboard!! Glad to have you.
Good Quote.
Good Quote.
This involves several issues. The first being that you can't see beyond your own immediate needs and wants. This is not Wiki8Club. It took many of us years and years of involvement and reading to amass the knowledge.
Imagine somebody coming here daily, in fact it is often multiple people daily, asking if not demanding the same information over and over again. We are not your on demand servants. We are people just like you with other priorities and demands in our lives, limited time, our own personal interests for being here, etc. Why should we spend that time catering to people that come here seeking instant gratification?
That leaves us with two options. We can either ignore you completely or we can tell that the info is here if you bother to make the effort. However, over several years of telling people this you eventually get fed up dealing with the continuous stream of people seeking instant gratification yet you still would rather point them in the right direction so you just bark at them to get the point across. Imagine someone coming to your house, going to your living room, pulling their pants down, and taking a dump right there on the carpet just because they didn't know any better. You might be annoyed and yet also understanding because they didn't know any better. Now imagine this being a different person doing this every day. It wouldn't be long before you just as soon they go away and never come back.
Almost every day there is some clueless dolt posting a tech or troubleshooting question in the DiY area, despite there being a sticky thread at the top saying to only post threads there with DIY instructions and subsequent discussion of same. The real issue is that people think they are free to just come here and do as they damn well please and there's no need for etiquette, rules, structure, or organization unless it serves their own personal interest.
Well guess what? We're not here to cater to new uninformed people that come in here trampling all over everything regardless if they're ignorant, just don't care, or whatever. This is like any social community and so if you make waves you better expect to deal with it. If you don't like it then get the f' out because the established community could care less about some newbie whining about not getting what they want immediately. We do care about you clogging up the search engine with useless threads on already established subjects, which there is a dedicated thread on this very subject in this same forum area no less. It took me 10 minutes to explain this. Now imagine multiple people daily requiring it, so you make a Sticky thread at the top that says "read this first" and yet every single new person just like yourself thinks they are beyond trying to fit in properly so that this forum operates smoothly for all of us.
You probably don't read Japanese, but the line in my sig is a well known Japanese proverb that reads "the nail that sticks out gets hammered". You made yourself that nail.
Imagine somebody coming here daily, in fact it is often multiple people daily, asking if not demanding the same information over and over again. We are not your on demand servants. We are people just like you with other priorities and demands in our lives, limited time, our own personal interests for being here, etc. Why should we spend that time catering to people that come here seeking instant gratification?
That leaves us with two options. We can either ignore you completely or we can tell that the info is here if you bother to make the effort. However, over several years of telling people this you eventually get fed up dealing with the continuous stream of people seeking instant gratification yet you still would rather point them in the right direction so you just bark at them to get the point across. Imagine someone coming to your house, going to your living room, pulling their pants down, and taking a dump right there on the carpet just because they didn't know any better. You might be annoyed and yet also understanding because they didn't know any better. Now imagine this being a different person doing this every day. It wouldn't be long before you just as soon they go away and never come back.
Almost every day there is some clueless dolt posting a tech or troubleshooting question in the DiY area, despite there being a sticky thread at the top saying to only post threads there with DIY instructions and subsequent discussion of same. The real issue is that people think they are free to just come here and do as they damn well please and there's no need for etiquette, rules, structure, or organization unless it serves their own personal interest.
Well guess what? We're not here to cater to new uninformed people that come in here trampling all over everything regardless if they're ignorant, just don't care, or whatever. This is like any social community and so if you make waves you better expect to deal with it. If you don't like it then get the f' out because the established community could care less about some newbie whining about not getting what they want immediately. We do care about you clogging up the search engine with useless threads on already established subjects, which there is a dedicated thread on this very subject in this same forum area no less. It took me 10 minutes to explain this. Now imagine multiple people daily requiring it, so you make a Sticky thread at the top that says "read this first" and yet every single new person just like yourself thinks they are beyond trying to fit in properly so that this forum operates smoothly for all of us.
You probably don't read Japanese, but the line in my sig is a well known Japanese proverb that reads "the nail that sticks out gets hammered". You made yourself that nail.
11-22-2011, 11:39 AM
#6
Veho Ergo Sum
Join Date: Jan 2011
Location: Ontario
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Great looking ride - welcome to the club! I also own an '06 GT and love it.
Just to clarify though: good mileage on the highway doesn't always mean a healthy engine... ask me how I know. Prior to engine replacement, my 8 would frequently hit 22-23mpg/hwy.
That's not to say you should expect problems - simply that the two don't necessarily correlate.
Enjoy the ride, this is a wonderful car.
Just to clarify though: good mileage on the highway doesn't always mean a healthy engine... ask me how I know. Prior to engine replacement, my 8 would frequently hit 22-23mpg/hwy.
That's not to say you should expect problems - simply that the two don't necessarily correlate.
Enjoy the ride, this is a wonderful car.
11-22-2011, 10:29 PM
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Dude, congrats. You've joined an exclusive club where we only know the awesomness that is the rx8. Great job on doing your homework and following your instinct despite popular stigma
Enjoy it; i have a similar story and 3 years later I'm still extremely satisfied.
I'll jot down the recommendations off the top of my head: (this will save you alot of time, you're welcome)
Enjoy it; i have a similar story and 3 years later I'm still extremely satisfied.
I'll jot down the recommendations off the top of my head: (this will save you alot of time, you're welcome)
- Premix! read the extensive thread and come up with your own opinion. After all that reading, if you can't, PM me and i'll tell u what I do.
- BHR ignition: https://www.rx8club.com/series-i-aftermarket-performance-modifications-23/latest-news-bhr-ignition-system-163670/
- https://www.rx8club.com/new-member-forum-197/congratulations-you-got-8-a-202548/#post3666147
- transmission and differential fluid swap
- Although honestly I couldn't tell you the difference before and after but maybe its a testament my transmission is still here? - Oil checks! - but you already know that
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