MAZDA LIGHTS A DIFFERENT PATH

This, 2020, is a big year for Mazda, as it celebrates its centenary. Here we feature one of its most significant and defining developments, a car that helped introduce the rotary engine to the public as a dramatically different way to motivate a vehicle.

Mazda’s tiny R100 coupé, also known as the ‘Familia Presto Rotary’ coupé in Japan, was launched in mid 1969 to a public stunned to discover that it could get around without pistons that went up and down or side to side.

To be fair, Mazda wasn’t entirely sure where its new baby would sit within various markets. Japanese cars were a new phenomenon at the time and the new rotary propulsion system only added to the unknowns, but it claimed, optimistically as it turns out, that rotary engines would one day replace piston engines entirely.

The R100 was the first mass-produced car to offer a rotary engine, after the initial small numbers of Mazda’s Cosmo 110 sports car and the