“Wow! Is that the new electric sports car?”

That’s what the excited young driver of a big Ford F-150 with a biodiesel sticker ran up to ask just after I’d parked the latest version of Mazda’s RX-8 sports car, the R3.

The fashionably scruffy passer-by obviously hadn’t seen the chromed exhaust pipes or heard the engine, and I’ll never know if he was referring to the two-seat Tesla Roadster or the upcoming Fisker Karma sedan, but the interaction serves to show that even five years after its introduction, the rotary-powered RX-8 is still turning heads, and it’s still rare enough on the street for those who don’t keep up with the enthusiast press to think it’s the latest and greatest.

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