Remembering the Mazda Cosmo: a coupé for the space age

Meet the wild and distinctive rotary game-changer

Named like a spaceship and powered by an other-worldly engine, the Mazda cosmo was a true child of the space age.

First revealed in 1964 ahead of the Tokyo Olympics, it looked like the lovechild of an Alfa Spider and an American coupe – and that was just the start.

See, it was the first Mazda machine to harness a Wankel-style rotary engine as its power unit and, despite the challenges posed by that most unique of powerplants, it would go on to spawn a line of successors that ended in 2012 with the RX-8.

Here’s its off-centre story – and why it mattered.

From saloons to sports car

Before Mazda there was Toyo Kogyo, and before the Cosmo there were several diminutive wagons – including the minuscule, 16bhp R360. Given that record, few in the early ’60s would have predicted where the company would go next: the 110S Cosmo.

Cosmic coupé

A sporting GT with styling straight out of a sci-fi film, the Japanese marque went to town on both the shell and the power plant. 

Eye-catching mash-up

Externally, it was a mash-up of smooth Italian lines and a long, saloon tail – and it was about the most radical thing in Britain when it was shown at the 1967 Motor Show.

In the words of Autocar, it was ‘certainly an eyecatcher’.

Not your average engine

Things were even more radical under the hood: there sat Mazda’s first ever rotary engine, as developed by Felix Wankel over several decades and painstakingly refined by NSU since the ’50s.

Remarkable rotary

What was special about the Wankel? Vastly different to a standard engine, in simple terms it relied on a triangular element that rotated asymmetrically inside a sealed chamber, creating three pockets of compression.

Swings and roundabouts

What were the benefits? The rotary engine was smoother, more compact and theoretically more efficient than a standard engine of the same size.

Alas, there were also many drawbacks, in particular the difficulty in ensuring that the tips of the triangle created a sufficient seal and were kept well-lubricated. The common solution was to add oil to the fuel which, predictably, harmed emissions.

Straight to the press

The Cosmo went on sale in 1967 with its engine producing 110bhp at 7000rpm and, in early 1968, a number of British magazines got their hands on it.

One word for it

As Autocar admitted, it was ‘different from anything we have previously experienced’.

The magazine went on to praise the ‘quick, precise’ steering and ‘impressive’ rear grip.

Smoothly does it

The smoothness of the rotary was also singled out – ‘When accelerating hard in second and third gears, it is all too easy to sail past 7000rpm without noticing it’ – as was the overall feel of the Cosmo.

‘The Mazda has a featherweight engine mounted well back and the result is steering so light as to be disconcerting at first… A potent little sports car of immense technical interest.’

Costly experiment

Priced at a cost of £2606 (that’s around £43k today), it was competing directly with the likes of the Lotus Elan and Porsche 912.

Though with a recorded 0-60mph time of 10.2 seconds it could outgun an MGB and a Triumph GT6, both of those cars cost notably less.

In the end, just 1519 examples of the hand-built Cosmo would leave the Hiroshima factory before the model was discontinued in 1972.

Racing success

Concerns regarding the motor’s reliability were to prove prescient: NSU had to honour rafts of warranty claims as it developed the rotary with several other manufacturers, notably Citroën.

Mazda, though, built on the Cosmo’s foundation to create a famous line of rotaries – from the RX-2 to the RX-7, via the seminal four-rotor 787B driven to overall victory at the 1991 running of the Le Mans 24 Hours.

Made by Wankel, moulded by Mazda

To say it all began with the Cosmo would be to do a disservice to the work of Wankel well before NSU and Mazda’s involvement.

However, it was thanks to the Japanese firm’s expertise that, despite all the problems in making it reliable, acceptably economical and able to pass increasingly stringent emissions regulations, the rotary survived into the 21st century.

Trialled in Tokyo

Before the Cosmo even went on sale, the manufacturer organised trials with 60 cars and 1000 members of the public. The president of Mazda himself, Tsuneji Matsuda, drove one from Hiroshima to Tokyo, a distance of some 800km. 

It was this commitment that helped Mazda achieve what NSU couldn’t: making the rotary reliable.

Not meant to be

1963’s NSU Spider might have been the first production car to carry a Wankel rotary engine, but it was the Cosmo that made it viable in the long run. 

While fears in the ’60s that the rotary powerplant would trump the standard engine didn’t come to pass (it's now used almost solely in motorsport), it remains an intriguing annal of motoring history – and the Cosmo was its space-age champion.