Few automotive experiments capture the imagination quite like a luxury sedan powered by a buzzing rotary engine — and yet that is exactly what Mazda attempted in the mid-1970s. While Toyota and Nissan were busy chasing Japan’s growing appetite for prestige cars, Mazda took a genuinely left-field approach: it borrowed a full-size Australian body from General Motors, stripped out the drivetrain, and dropped in its own Wankel rotary. The result was the Roadpacer, one of the strangest executive sedans ever to roll off a production line — and one of the most fascinating failures in automotive history.
Â
