For their home market, it’s still very much a worthwhile investment in terms of diversifying carbon-offset options. They’ll be fine.

I’ll drop in another agree. It feels like they slapped something together to appease people bitching about it on the internet - which is ironic because most owners say “you get used to the infotainment and don’t really interact with it much”. That half-assed approach to the update upsets me greatly, because the car was not compromised before in terms of design in any way, while now it is. That’s inexcusable in your halo coupe that’s $100k+.

** looks over at RX-8 in garage **

It’s my time to shine, baby!

Jokes aside, massive displacement, low power engines are hugely fun.

Whenever I used to get compliments on my old Juke Nismo RS. With how polarizing of a car it is, I expected that to be rare (if ever), but a surprising number of people would give a compliment to me at the gas station. From the general consensus, people enjoyed that it was a car that absolutely did not take itself seriously - nor did I, since I usually referred to it as a “fast frog”. A fun car, and I do miss it sometimes - the manual trans was definitely a “make it or break it” for that car, and I’m glad I got to experience it’s full blown ridiculousness with the stick.

Oh, I have no qualms with my car at all - I actually special ordered it, so it’s exactly what I wanted (bar a couple options that only became available with the next model year). I just hate the idea that if I do decide to change things up, options for something I like just become less and less.

For now…I’m fearing I’ll have to hang onto my IS for the foreseeable future if they bungle the new one up.

Ran into the same kind of issues when I was a service advisor working for Mazda. When they started building the 3 sedan there, quality started dropping on those cars, and Mazda even had service bulletins specific to MX built cars. This is also true of when I was younger and worked at a Honda dealer when second gen Fits were released, since they started to be produced there for North America - much poorer QC. To this day, I’ll never recommend someone to buy an MX built car if there is the option to purchase the same vehicle built elsewhere.