Would You Buy a Dual Rotor, RX-7-Adjacent Mazda Sports Car?

• Mazda has cemented its sports car legend status with models like the MX-5 and RX-7, but it doesn't plan on letting up anytime soon, either.

• Unveiled at the Japan Mobility Show in Tokyo, Mazda's new Iconic SP concept ushers in a new era of Hiroshima-built sports cars, specifically with 21st-century technology.

• Powered by a two-rotor, hybrid-electric powerplant and with a 50:50 weight distribution, Mazda aims to compete in a higher-price, better-performance sports car segment.

Continuing to produce the Miata for over two decades is a triumph enough to cement Mazda as one of the modern keepers of sports car heritage. No matter how crossover and SUV-focused the Hiroshima-based brand has become, it manages to produce and sell a genuinely quality roadster in 2023. But Mazda wasn't always pigeonholed like this.

In fact, Mazda's legacy lays out a slew of innovative, performance-strong models, from the legendary RX-7 to its Subaru STI-competing Mazdaspeed 6. Better yet, it's Mazda's two-door coupes that have stood the test of time, and the company plans to continue this trend.

And it's doing so in a spectacular way, revealing the new Mazda Iconic SP concept at the 2023 Japan Mobility Show in Tokyo. With a quintessential smiley mouth, protruding fenders, and a low-slung chassis, Mazda is blending its FD RX-7 heritage with a modern interpretation of a TVR, though the real shock of the Iconic SP concept is its powertrain.

Mazda claims this one-day-road-worthy concept will be powered by a twin-rotor EV system. If it was hard to understand how a two-rotor, twin-turbo engine functioned in the final RX-7 iteration, then we're all certainly in for a 21st-century wakeup call in the form of Mazda's Iconic SP concept.

By using a highly scalable, hydrogen-fueled rotary engine, Mazda says its rotary resurgence powerplant will primarily be used for power generation, while the hybrid-electric system adds some pep. This is all preliminary, of course, as Mazda was coy about the specifics of its potentially revolutionary propulsion configuration.

We haven't been able to pull out a measuring tape to verify these figures ourselves, but Mazda teased enough dimensions to give us some idea of the Iconic SP concept's size. At 164.6 inches long, 72.8 inches wide, and 45.3 inches tall, this compact coupe sizes up against the likes of Subaru's BRZ, though the claimed 365 hp pits it against the BMW M240i.