Introduction

The 2009 Mazda RX-8 is weird. Its body style? Weird. Its engine? Weirder. Its styling? Yep, that's pretty strange too. Since its introduction five years ago, the RX-8 has served as an automotive asterisk. However, weird can be a good thing. Jim Carrey's weird and so is Japan, but plenty of people saw "Ace Ventura" and vacation in Tokyo. At the same time, though, those two entities also produced "23" and cucumber-flavored Pepsi (respectively, of course). So goes the 2009 Mazda RX-8 -- weird in good ways and bad.

The 2009 Mazda RX-8's coupe-like body features a pair of rear-hinged doors that grant easy access to the surprisingly roomy backseat. If you've ever seen an extended-cab pickup, it's the same idea. Given the car's performance and handling capabilities, that old marketing cliché of "four-door sports car" actually applies here. Under the hood is not a sports car's typical inline-4 or V6, but instead, Mazda's signature rotary engine. The number of other cars that feature this type of engine is exactly zero, but the resulting effect is that the 2009 Mazda RX-8 behaves like nothing else. With the manual transmission, the rotary engine spins up to 9,000 rpm with the ease of a blowtorch through Country Crock. The sounds are glorious, and playing with such a free-flowing, high-strung engine is a lot of fun.

All of this would be weird in a good way except that the rotary can also get tiresome in everyday use, as it produces very little low-end torque. Drive sedately and the 2009 Mazda RX-8 feels like a slug. That high-spinning nature also hammers fuel consumption to the point that the 3,000-pound, 232-horsepower2009 Mazda RX-8 gets the same fuel economy as the 4,300-pound, 273-hp Mazda CX-9 crossover. That's weird in a bad way.

That last point is truly the 2009 Mazda RX-8's Achilles' heel. We could probably live with the rotary's less-than-stellar straight-line performance, given the fun derived from the RX-8's superb handling, but the fuel economy and dearth of low-end power are hard to reconcile. The BMW 128i, Nissan 350Z and Mustang GT provide better performance and/or fuel economy for a similar price. Of course, none of those cars provide the practical four-door coupe body style or that one-of-a-kind styling inside and out. In other words, if the 2009 Mazda RX-8's your type of weird, there's no other choice.