rx8daniel

I thought this deserving of it's own thread instead of under C&D testing - they reported 15MPG during their 500 mile 'trip'. It is obvious this wasn't a 65MPH highway cruise type of trip. It involved a lot of stop and go and 1st/2nd gear driving and a lot of heavy acceleration testing (1/4 mile, 0-60,5-60,0-100 for starters).
Let's not get heavily concerned with poor mileage from racing type of stats. On the other hand if you plan to do a heavy weekend of track duty you'd be best to watch the gas gauge since you don't typically want to be on the track with a full tank.

DTECH-RX

The mileage does concern me a bit, especially if it was listed as 15 mpg AVERAGE! What's up with that? I thought it was suppose to be at least 20% more fuel efficient?

rx8daniel

I imagine there is a disclaimer somewhere in the EPA estimates which I believe are 18/23 city/highway saying that because of variations in environment and driving habits your mileage may vary or something to that effect. If not, there should be.
At any rate, if you plan to laregly do normal 'commuting' type of driving then you should get somewhere close to the EPA numbers and closer to the city number if you drive more city - stop and go type where your average speed is around 25 MPH and closer to the highway number if your driving includes a lot of above 50MPH stretches. My Subaru XT6 has a cool little computer that computes average speed, distance to destination, outside temp & other data. In normal around town driving my average MPH is around 23 - 25 MPH. That includes idle time and even if the key is 'on' but the car isn't actually running which I try to minimize. It's amazing how your average speed drops in town because of idling at stop lights, signs, starting, parking, etc. That's why city numbers are always lower than highway consumption. On the other side of the coin, I used to own a TDI New Beetle(turbodiesel). I average about 47MPG overall. Spend time on a track one weekend with a lot of higher RPM band driving, mostly from 40-100MPH, and averaged 25MPG. There was a girl on the NB email list that had a gasoline NB in Nevada or CA somewhere where she hit mountains a LOT. She averaged over 50MPG quite often. The reason is she had a LOT of downhill mountain runs that-i you've ever had a Chrysler product you know what I mean-can often lead to short-term runs of over 100MPG. Uphill you get less mileage but not less than zero MPG. Her averages were so high because of this phenomena. In summary, if you plan to do autocrosses in any car most of the time then your mileage will be lower because of the amount of time spent at idle or in 1st or 2nd gear. That's the type of driving C&D did mostly - running with the pedal nearly to or to the floor. Base your expectations of mileage on your expectations of driving needs/style.

DTECH-RX

I typically average right in the middle of my cars EPA MPG range even with a little bit of spirited driving per tank, especially after break-in. It makes sense that the RX would likely get 15 or 16 mpg if you beat the snot out of it for an entire tank full like C&D probably did, I just want to be able to average about 20-21MPG if I can with a mix of city / highway driving.

Ultimately, it's not a HUGE concern, but I would think that a relatively light sports car, driven reasonably for the majority of the time would get better gas mileage than an SUV.

rx8daniel

My past experience with my RX-7s was that I was usually on the short end of the MPG I expected or my model was rated. OTH I always had fairly well used ones, the one exception being my 84 GSL-SE that only had 48-65K while in my hands. But even that as I remember it rarely returned much over 20MPG. If there was one thing that has been disappointing about rotaries in my opinion, it is the poor gas mileage. Compared to my Miata, or a Honda Prelude, which can easily hit 30MPG in normal driving, 20 is not a lot. On the other hand, as other threads have noted, 1.3L is perhaps comparable to a 2.6L 6cylinder in performance, so it is difficult to compare to any other engines or cars. We'll just have to see what our mileage is with the RX-8. And at worst, I consider it a mild and about the only negative of an RX car.

Lensman

The 350Z drinks at 20/26 so if the RX-8's rotary is the equivalent of a 2.6L piston engine then it's down by nearly 1000cc!

imujon

i was hoping that the rx-8 would be around 26 mpg or something since its so light and its renesis engine. i hope mazda is not lying to us because they said better mileage. if they think better mileage is below 20, then what about nissan and other sport cars? they dont really talk about having no better mileage. gosh this makes me want to think about whether i would like to drive a rx-8, 350z, or a is300. its getting harder and harder to say. but rx-8 is still the car of my choice while nissan 350z being very close.