Mazda museum never gets old

No visit to Mazda's Hiroshima HQ is complete without a side trip to the company's museum.

While the small facility lacks the modernity of the stand-alone Honda Collection at its Twin Ring Motegi premises, the Mazda museum remains a fascinating place to pass the time.

Guided tours take visitors in a chronological sequence starting with the very first Mazda vehicle to enter series production, a three-wheel truck that looks like the front end of a motorbike grafted to the tray of a light truck. The tour guide will tell you that Mazda began life in 1920, making corks, before commencing vehicle production in 1931. For a time, the three-wheeled Mazda trucks were being distributed in Japan through Mitsubishi's own sales channel.

The first car with four wheels to be developed and sold by Mazda was the R360 'Carol' from 1960.

It was followed by a succession of better known cars, including the rotary-engined Cosmo Sports and the Bertone-styled Luce, which was sold in Australia as the Mazda 1500 and the later Mazda 1800.

Rotary-engined variants sold alongside piston-engined counterparts during the 1970s, but the oil shock of the early 1970s threw a spanner in the works for the rotary engine that Mazda had planned to promote as a technological tour de force that would boost its own brand image. It became clear during this decade that the rotary's prodigious thirst for fossil fuel would preclude it from being a mainstream passenger-car offering, and that resulted in its best known application – 1979's RX-7.

That change in philosophy ultimately led to Mazda campaigning its 787B racer at Le Mans with a four-rotor engine – and winning in 1991.

While the future of rotary power remains clouded, there's no doubt of the part it has played in Mazda's history... something the museum shows very clearly.