Yes, yes it can, which is a little odd. After looking like the future of lightweight Japanese sports cars, the Mazda RX-8 became a laughing stock due to its poor reliability ratings. But Car Throttle doesn't mind having eggs on their faces, so they bought one for pennies.
It had a few dings and scratches, but the biggest problem was a lack of compression for one of the cylinders. We forgot the exact numbers, but it was making more like 160 horsepower. The rebuild video was pretty cool, but we didn't share it due to our lack of advanced understanding of rotary engines.
But this, this is goofing off, which we know everything about. The video is like one of those old Top Gear challenges where they take some crap old beater and see if they can make a long trip on one tank of fuel. Car Throttle did the same thing with their Skoda Octavia, but that was a 1.9 TDI, well known for mpgs and reliability whereas the RX-8 is notoriously thirsty.
The hypermiling adventure needs Alex to get 400 miles out of one tank of fuel, traveling from London to Edinborough. It starts in the dead of night, taking advantage of the lack of traffic. There's take on the hood for streamlining, and the AC is off to conserve fuel. But even with a super-light foot, it's going to be close.
I don't know why hypermiling is cool, but it is. Being stuck between roadworks and speed cameras, the average gas monkey must have thought "30 mpg... those are rookie numbers." And it's even cooler in cars that are bad with fuel, like large V8s or... 1.3-liter Japanese sports cars from a decade ago. In any case, you wouldn't believe how close the RX-8 got to running out of fuel.
Mihnea's favorite cars have already been built, the so-called modern classics from the '80s and '90s. He also loves local car culture from all over the world, so don't be surprised to see him getting excited about weird Japanese imports, low-rider VWs out of Germany, replicas from Russia or LS swaps down in Florida. Full profile
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