History/driving impressions originally published in AutoWeek April 11, 1994; republished by the author

The Mazda RX-5 Cosmo was styled intentionally for the 1970s US market.

Mazda expected the waterfall grille of the Mazda RX-5 Cosmo irresistible to American car buyers.

The 1975 Mazda RX-5 Cosmo had opera windows and hockey stick taillights.

Is that a Buick grille on the 1975 Mazda RX-5 Cosmo?

 

The Mazda Cosmo should have been a runaway success. After all, it was a car that Toyo Kogyo, as the Hiroshima-based Mazda was then known, specifically designed for the U.S. market and it arrived as car buyers were thinking “downsize.” Yet the Cosmo was a colossal dud in North America. What went wrong?

Well, at the time of its launch, little was going right.

Mazda Motors of America (Northwest) debuted in 1970 in a Seattle suburb and the rotary-engined R-100 was introduced to an eager public. When California dealerships opened a year later, bullhorns were needed for crowd control. The company rode a rotary-powered rocket up the sales chart in America. The “Wankel’s rise” was Automotive News’ 1972 story of the year. By April 1973, Mazda ranked fourth in monthly imported car sales behind Volkswagen, Toyota and Datsun.

How quickly it would turn. Mazda rotaries had a reputation of being thirsty – and the energy crisis was 1973’s automotive story of the year. By December ‘73, Mazda was paying rebates to dealers for selling the hard-to-move RX-2 and RX-3 – but not its piston-engined models. For the next two years, Mazda struggled to stay alive, touting the performance of the rotary-engine cars while defending its economy against government tests and correcting the rotary’s early seal problem. Even in Japan, Toyo Kogyo had to sell off assets and send factory workers into the field to sell cars.

The crisis was met with a new philosophy: The rotary-engined cars would compete at the top end of the market and the piston-engined models would take on the economy market. For the latter, a 1300 cc stripper version of the Mazda 808, dubbed the Mizer, topped the 1976 EPA mileage chart. For the top end there was the Cosmo.

The Cosmo’s full name included, at least on the home market, an “RX-5” suffix that wasn’t used here. It may have been redundant; it wasn’t needed to distinguish the new car from the earlier Cosmo 110S two-seat rotary sports car which wasn’t marketed here.

Mechanically, the Cosmo borrowed heavily from the RX-4, using the engine and basic chassis, but with significant suspension changes. The wheelbase was unchanged, though lower A-arms replaced a simple lateral link on the strut-type front suspension. The RX-4’s rear leaf springs were superseded by coils, four trailing links and a Panhard Rod.

As with other Mazda models, a Borg-Warner three-speed automatic was optional: a five-speed manual was standard, the first Mazda so equipped. Disc brakes, vented at the front, were fitted all around, another first for Mazda. Power steering was a new Mazda option.

The 13-B engine was rated at 110 hp, as in 1975, but all Mazda rotaries (except the pickups) had smaller ports in 1976 for fuel economy. Torque was rated a few lb ft higher, but the Cosmo (and other models) was slower, suggesting lower real horsepower.

But it was styling, both inside and out, that critics really panned. Road & Track call the exterior “antiquated and unappealing.” No hedging there, though the magazine really singled out only the roll-down opera windows as “more a gimmick than anything new.” Regarding the interior R&T liked the fit and finish but found it “somehow reminiscent of a house of ill repute.” The steering wheel rim, the shift knob and parking brake handle were wood, though the instrument panel was a phony burl. A big speedometer and tachometer were separated by a remote auto-trans gear indicator (blanked out on manual-shift cars) and three smaller openings to the right housed a clock, temperature and fuel gauges, while “gen” and oil warning lights were arched to look like gauges. Power windows were optional, with controls – as Mazda said – “thoughtfully located on the center console.” Oddly, these operated only the door windows; the opera windows, which retracted fully, still were hand-cranked.

The steering wheel had wire spokes like an old MGA, but the shifter was as long as an old Volvo’s.

What Cosmo does like only a Mazda is run, as we discovered driving the 1976 owned by Greg Mazur of Gallitzin, Pa. Mazur repainted his Cosmo (including the originally chrome bumpers and recoloring the headlamp bezels from gray to black), but the car is otherwise stock and mostly original, including optional cast-aluminum wheels instead of styled steel wheels.

Today the Cosmo’s 18.1-second quarter-mile and 111-mph top speed (Mazur says he’s gone faster) is unremarkable. But it was born in the Dark Ages of the mid-1970s. Its lively feel belies the numbers, and it’s smoother than a PR pitchman. Steering has the usual free play of a recirculating-ball system, and its skidpad number of 0.726 g is about par for the era. From the driver’s seat the Cosmo feels like a typical Japanese coupe of the time minus the usual four-cylinder buzz.

The Cosmo was sold alongside the RX-3 (which came in two-door and wagon form) and RX-4 (sedan, wagon and coupe) in ‘76. Mazda dropped the RX-3 wagon for 1977 and the coupe version of the RX-4 was gone as well, avoiding competition with the Cosmo. The rotary models would do a curtain call in ‘78, the year in which the GLC and ‘79 RX-7 would debut.

Although the Cosmo sold poorly in the States, its popularity in Japan saved Toyo Kogyo, so the model had a successor, though the 1979 Cosmo wasn’t imported here.

More’s the pity for the American rotary fan who now sees the Eunos Cosmo hopelessly out of reach. It seems all wrong, but Mazda is probably right.

Addendum: If Mazda seems particularly addicted to the rotary engine, it’s for good reason. The engine was Mazda’s rescue, as MITI, Japan’s “department of commerce” was pressuring Japanese carmakers to merge. In the early Sixties, family-owned Mazda was being pressured to join Toyota, also family-owned. Searching for an excuse not to, Mazda latched on to the rotary engine as its reason for independence, it’s “technological charter.” The Mazda Cosmo Sport would be Mazda’s first rotary engine-powered car, the story of that car here.

Incidenally, when R&T called the Cosmo “somehow reminiscent of a house of ill repute,” how did they know what the interior of a house of ill repute like? Reminiscent? The author was remembering? Hmmm.

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