Tire/brake pad wear
 

Anyone care to estimate tire life and brake-pad life for the 6-speed? Understand that 'performance' packages can have dismal service life, and replacement costs are nothing to look forward to.

It depends entirely on how you use them.

Brake pads usually get replaced at 20, 30, 40k miles depending on how you drive. Being that the car's a manual, you can always rev up the engine and let the car slow down on its own though... it's not recommended :)

Isn't that a good enough reason to learn to do it yourself?

Tire replacement concerns me the most. The tire size on the RX-8 is 225/45-18 if I remember correctly. This is not a very common size. A quick search at Tirerack.com was disappointing. If you get 35-40K out of the OEM tires, you're doing very well.

I searched by the size noted above, for summer tires and all season tires, from all manufacturers and speed ratings H,V,W,Y,and Z. The search returned the 5 tires listed below:

Bridgestone Potenza S-03 Pole Position $185
Michelin Pilot Sport $249
Pirelli PZero Rosso $194
Bridgestone Potenza RE040 (OEM?) $199
Continental ContiSport Contact $125

Pretty damn expensive. I just put 4 new tires on my 99 Mitsu Montero Sport (Bridgestone Dueler AT 265/75-15 for $400). My wallet was screaming at me as I tortured it.

I conducted the same search for 225/45-17, and that search yielded 69 choices. Prices start from $70 for Kuhmo Ecsta 711. I don't have any knowledge of the quality of these tires, but considering the least expensive 18" tire is $125, that's a big difference. Please, let's not start a "that tire sucks, this one's better" flame war - that is not my intent.

I know the current trend is bigger wheels, but the price differences in a 17" tire and a 18" tire seem to be pretty big. I think I would have preferred Mazda go with a 17" rim on the higher performance model. If I try aftermarket wheels at 17", I'm concerned the larger brakes will pose a problem. Are we stuck with the 18" wheels then?

Thread Highjacker!!! ;)

No, Mazda has explicitly stated that 17" wheels will fit over the brakes. Their rationale was that folks in areas that actually have a winter, can mount 17" snow tires.

I suspect this size tire might get more maufacturers support once the RX-8 has been around a few months.

Wether other manufacturers support the size won't really bring the price down very much. The cost difference between 17" and 18" tires is substantial. Unfortunately Mazda went with the "bigger is better so we must compete with others!" marketing theory and used the 18's. I would have been satisfied with 17's but whachha gonna do.. Gotta pay to play.. :(

Switching to 17" rims would be more practicle, but takes a lot more coin upfront.

I was (actually still am) hoping that the dealers give us an option of either 17" or 18" wheels/tires as many are now doing. When I bought an IS300 three years ago, they offered 17" performance vs. 16" all-season (same cost).

This way, we can just change tires during the winter, instead of wheels and tires - which is even more expensive. Obviously, this would be a regional thing.

If you searched for 225/45-17 as a replacement rim/tire combination for that car, you searched wrong. That combination will yield a smaller overall tire/rim combination and throw off your speedo. I think 225/55-17 may be more appropriate? Don't quote me. Also, you could always increase or decrease the width (first number) a bit as long as you can still turn lock-to-lock on the wider tire...rims will accomodate a range of tire sizes, however without knowing the rim width I couldn't tell you what the range is for the RX-8. Just know, you may have more options for tires than you are looking at right now, some more, some less expensive.

It also takes the car out of Stock class if you want to autocross. :(

35-40k would be great - that's what I'd expect from a family car with moderate driving . I was expecting that it might be closer to 20k (sedately, without the 8000 rpm clutch drops), given the softer composition of the performance rubbers.

Same for the brakes, assume you get less life than say the Camry because the materials are softer & grippier.

The tires that I saw on the RX-8 on display at the Atlanta autoshow were 18" "Directional" tires (they had the little directional arrows embedded in the rubber).

And I understand that directional tires cost considerably more than "non-directional" tires - but I don't know the difference. I suppose the tread has to "point" a certain way with the "directional" type???

Does anyone know what "directional" tires are?

on a directional tire, the tread design is optimized to rotate in a certain direction. most performance tires now are directional

On early Yokahama A-001's and A-008's, the direction of rotation was determined by the internal construction of the tire. But these days, it's mostly due to the tread design. A tire with a tread pattern that looks like this
//\\
//\\
//\\
should be mounted so that the point of those vees is towards the front of the car when viewed from above (ie if that was the top of the tire, the vehicle should be pointing towards the top of the page). This is so that the tread grooves direct any water out towards the edges of the tire rather than trapping it in the center of the tread.

In addition, some tires are both directional and asymetric, usually with large uninterupted tread bands on the outside edge to aid in cornering. An asymetric directional tire might look like this when viewed from above:
||\\
||\\
||\\
This would be a left-hand tire if the vehicle were pointing towards the top of the screen.

Hope that helps!

I'd say it's pretty safe to assume that 99% of all summer only high performance tires are directional.