Aluminium rear doors & bonnet
 

I often mention to people that the RX8 comes with Aluminium rear doors and bonnet :cool: yet i dont seem to get much feed back . :confused:

To me this feature apart from the weight saving aspect indicated to me the extent that the Mazda engineers went to to get this car just right .

Is this feature undervalued by the buying public because its not readily visible ???

Are Mazdas salesmen even telling the prospective purchaser of this feature ??

Would it have been more prudent for Mazda to spend the cost of the Aluminium rear doors and bonnet on other features ???

Need your thoughs ??

cheers
michael

I suspect that the average non-enthusiast doesn't understand the value of weight savings and performance in general. So aluminum or steel, doesn't register with them. In fact, a friend who recently purchased a RX-8, due in part to my influence, stated that he didn't understand why they made the hood (bonnet) out of aluminum since it will be much more suceptible to impact damage. (And he's certainly correct there since mine has a dent in it that was made by a stone impact on the bra.) Even when I explained that it was an effort to reduce the weight of the car and thereby improve performance, it didn't register with him.

Well ... not like thats anything too unusual. It's nice, but honestly all that matters is how the car drives in the end. It wouldn't matter if they were made of lead, if the car still drove great it would sell.

Mazda has always been dedicated too, and known the benefits of less weight. The 8 is just the latest incarnation of that. It would be nice if they could get some real power AND have less weight.

BOOSTD7

I understand your point , however what other cars in the same/ similar price range give you the rear doors and bonnet in Aluminium ?? :)

So in my mind these features are great value per dollar spent on the car for a prospective purchaser .

Wow i have over 3000 post and i finally get a reply from the BOSS........... ;) :cool:

cheers
michael

I had no idea that the hood and rear doors were aluminum until my first autocross when I tried to craftily stick my magnetic numbers on them, and they fell right off. I stormed back to the magnetic lettering dude that was at the autocross selling them and told him that the magnets were faulty. He looked at me a second, and then at my car, and said "Which doors did you try to put them on?" I said, "The rears."

He smiled and just said "Try the fronts. The rears are aluminum." Guy knew more about my car than I did!

Something tells me that, to most American (or perhaps 'people' in general) saying that the car has significant aluminum parts is actually a bad thing, and it's probably better that salesman don't mention it.

To most people, aluminum == aluminum cans == CRUSH. People would probably rather not know their cars are made out of the same material as the can they just crushed in their hand yesterday. Americans in particular like the idea of big heavy steel behemoths.

Who knows, since nobody markets things like that ;)

I'm not the boss, just another fanatic like yourself. I'm working for you all :D

Not the first time... the Miata has had an aluminum hood since day one.. dents easy, but a PDR guy will take those right out with minimal effort. :)

Hell, the steel on the main doors (back to the 8 here) dents pretty easy too :( I dented mine when I gave the car its first wash ever... just lightly bumped it with the brush wand and *dent*

Mazda has something called the "gram team" or something to that effect -- a team whose sole job is to go over the design and prototypes, and ID where folks can shave one gram of weight per component. Netted us a 2500 pound FD, a 2200 pound (originally) Miata, and a barely 3000 pound four-door four-hole car.

You might be so right with that. On the other hand, the Audi A8 is highly valuated
in the US - so nobody here knows that the A8's body is ALL Aluminium? :rolleyes:

The lightest production FD was 2730 ... but yea, read through the Yamaguchi book and see all the weights they saved ounces on that car.

When you have the majority of the public fraking oit over Chrysler 300 hemi cars and bass as 5000 pick-ups, I don't think that they will understnad the value of the Aluminium rear doors and bonnet.

Most American "Car Enthusiasts" understand and like this aspect of this car.

Of course. And there are many expensive cars that have significant amounts of aluminum. But they aren't targetted to as wide of a market as the RX-8 is. The RX-8 is an enthusiasts' car targetted at a market that's a bit wider than that. A salesman would probably do better to judge the values of the person buying the car before mentioning aluminum body panels.

I had to inform my salesman about the aluminum parts, as well as the need for snow tires. He didn't even know about the oil consumption. What a dumb @ss. Needless to say he got a bad review from me.