Normally I don’t take notice the passing of a long-time auto executive, but I’ll make an exception with the news of the recent death of Kenichi Yamamoto. He once served as president and chairman of Mazda, but he became most famous by being head of the team of engineers that perfected the rotary engine for […]

My very first car was cheap as in it was given to me. I lived in Alabama at the time, and in those days, for some reason, the car’s value had to be listed as something, so the relative who handed the vehicle off to me gave me a sales slip for $300 in cash […]

I understand the need for wanting something now, and it’s not just an attractive fellow member of our species. Back in the late 1960s, I took a test drive in an innovative motor vehicle that masqueraded as a simple compact car. It was the Mazda R100, the first mass-produced car that contained the Wankel Rotary […]

To put things into perspective, don’t forget that a millisecond is a thousandth of a second. It takes 300 to 400 milliseconds for your eye to blink, and I don’t expect you can measure it on your stop watch. Back in the 1970s, I drove a mundane-looking but innovative car, a Mazda RX2, which featured […]