How do you know if you qualify for the extended warranty that Mazda offers on your RX8 engine

 

You don't. The warranties on the last 8s expired in 2019.

 

Which is a joke, considering the warranty was 8 years or 160K km. I still only have 120K on mine. and its an '05

 

It's how all warranties work. Age or mileage, whichever comes first. Otherwise the opposite would also make no sense: asking for 8 years of coverage if you drive 100,000 a year.

 

You will get a third-party warranty, as Loki said, all RX-8 factory warranty should have expired by this point. Make sure you read the fine prints; apparently some warranties discriminate against rotary engines.

All Mazda reman engines come with a 12-month/12,000km(not sure about the mileage) when installed by a dealer.

And yep, every factory powertrain warranty will have a time and mileage limit, whichever comes first.

 

And still such short warranty on a "new" engine is awful. 3rd party engine rebuilders offer x2-3 that at 1/2 the price...
Anyway. Its a car designed in 2000-2003, you really expect a manufacturer to continue to support a 20yo car when the world has changed so much over the last 2 decades?

 

Are there any aftermarket warranties that people have had good luck with for rotaries?

 

I doubt it, but they'd probably still take your money.
You'd have to read them.
Coverage will often be for parts rotaries don't have.

 

So the limitation is that they don't explicitly include specifically rotors/housings, and not that they explicitly exclude them or rotaries more generally?

 

I think anything not specifically mentioned would be excluded.
I imagine it would be nearly impossible to get a warranty on a Renesis engine that many believe was a lemon from the factory,
unless you pay a very high monthly premium.
It seems if any were available for RX8s, it would be a pretty big topic here.

 

I'm looking to get an RX8 soon (catch the relative market lull for sport cars going into winter). There's an S2 with low miles for sale near me that's been sitting on the market a while (priced too high), and I thought with the low miles it might be relatively inexpensive to get one of those aftermarket warranties. Never had one before, and always turned my own wrench. Guess I'll keep doing that...

 

I'm not sure a low mileage rotary engine is indicative of its past care and health. Low mileage means less wear and tear on suspension, interior, belts, hoses etc. These cars are around 10 years old at minimum. Everything ages....
I'd look for a well cared for RX8 with full maintenance records.

 

Oh yeah. I know the routine. Neither my first rodeo nor my first rotary. I used to go through a car every six months or so. I'm waiting for some dust to settle and the first big snow before I even start responding to ads. Don't want to waste anyone's time.

There are nine RX8s listed in the area currently between CL and FB (excluding autos, closed those tabs as soon as they were open enough to know), and all but two are '04s. All but one are modified and/or ragged to ****. Two have fresh rebuilds/remans, but one guy (with the other non-'04) thinks his clapped out hooptie with messed up paint and torn upholstery is worth easily three to four times what it actually is (even with the silly used car prices at the moment) because not only does it have a new engine, but HE built it HIMSELF, and that matters at all in any positive way to me and would somehow even be preferable to one rebuilt by Mazda or any competent rotary shop.

Since warranties are sort of a reliability subject matter, and I don't have the post count to start threads (or at least I think that's the issue), what's the state of the world in 2021 (ten years after the last rotary rolled off the assembly line) in terms of things that are beginning to fail routinely/should be looked out for? Also, parts availability? Seems that it used to be S2 things were hard to find, but digging through some of the parts suppliers' sites it looks like the field is about even these days. The aftermarket seems to still slightly favor S1s (I was able to find one or two things I didn't care about that were S1 only), but I haven't seen any stock engine parts that were totally NLA for only one or the other just yet.