Back in 1975, the car that most typified Australiana, it could be argued, was the HJ Holden. It was a large, heavy 4 door sedan powered by torquey, Holden “red” straight sixes and V8s.
It was also a car that pre-dated Holden’s introduction of “Radial Tuned Suspension”, and as such, was pretty much a wallowy barge to drive around in.
About this same time, in Japan,Toyota was selling the Century, Mitsubishi the Debonair, and Nissan the President. All large, luxury based cars that headed their respective company’s fleets.
Mazda had no competitor for the likes of these 4 door luxury sedans, despite having made great success in the 2 door luxury market with their Cosmo RE LTD. A situation they were hoping to fix.
Meanwhile, General Motors in the USA desperately wanted information about how exactly Mazda’s rotary worked(this was while they were working on the quad rotor Corvette).
So a deal was struck where Mazda would trade said information for a heap of cars from GM. A big part of this exchange involved family-sized bodyshells, in the form of the HJ Holdens, making their way to Japan.
Due to Japanese taxes based on engine capacity at the time, the torquey Holden engines were flung out, and in their place, went 13B Rotaries.
The result is one of the worst tragedies to befall car history.
The car, which Mazda labeled “Roadpacer” was an abysmal failure. It had the heavy weight of the HJ combined with an engine that only produced 187Nm of torque, and at the top of the rev range too.
To make things worse, the Roadpacer was fitted with a 3 speed automatic, because the competition’s cars were all autos. This compounded the performance problem and underlined the lack of torque even more.
The thing crawled along slower than a turtle with a broken leg.
Then there was the fuel economy. A big car powered by a small, thirsty, rotary engine that needs to be revved constantly to go anywhere does not a thrifty vehicle make. The thing ended up using a heck of a lot more fuel than the Carby 308 V8 ever did in the Aussie HJ.
Adding more embarrassment for Mazda was the relatively crummy construction of the thing with panel gaps never seen before by the Japanese public, and quality problems from one end of the body to the other.
The final straw that broke the camel’s back was that all said and done, the vehicle ended up with a price more than double that of the top of the rung Cosmo, and up to 1.7 times as much as the local competition.
Mazda slowly sold 800 of the things over the course of 2 years, at greatly discounted prices.
In Japan today, if you mention the Mazda Roadpacer, the response is similar to if you talked about a mythical creature. It was so bad, they can hardly believe it ever really existed….
Definitely a complete and utter Basketcase!!
Michael Adams for Infinite-Garage
Article Originally Created for World Car Reviews