The only RX-8 generation, launched worldwide for 2003 and built for nine years without a facelift-driven body change beyond a longer nose and new bumpers for 2009.[1] Two states of tune of the naturally aspirated Renesis engine were sold throughout: a lower-revving 4-port version and a free-revving 6-port version limited to 9,000 rpm, the closest the RX-8 came to a base/performance split, since Mazda never offered a turbocharged version of this engine to the public.
The car’s engine table, quoted here, is European and gives 0–100 km/h and a metric top speed directly, so none of those figures needed converting from a US 0–60 mph time, unlike the RX-7 entries, where the source only ever gives the imperial figure. The trade-off is that the same table’s CO2 row does not name a test cycle, which is recorded as a gap rather than guessed at.
