Kingswood rice-burner

Thanks to AMC reader Dean Sandham of Ipswich, Queensland, for letting us know about a very rare Holden that appeared for sale a while ago. Well, it looks like a Holden. In fact, it’s a 1976 Mazda Roadpacer. It may sound like a joke from an episode of ‘Kingswood Country’ but in 1975 Mazda in Japan imported a stack of HJ Premier body shells and fitted them with the Wankel 13B rotary engine from its RX4 model. 
“The closest thing to a GM rotary,” commented Wheels magazine, which reported on this project in June 1975 (not the April 1 edition, as you might be thinking). It happened shortly after GM’s own plans for a rotary-engined sedan were aborted. Mazda then decided it needed a large luxury car for the Japanese market and was so impressed by the HJ Holden package that it did a deal. It was reported that Mazda was producing Roadpacers at a rate of 100 a month.
If so, they wouldn’t have sold too many. According to contemporary reports these were truly awful cars. They were overpriced, fuel consumption was terrible (around nine miles per gallon - and this during the oil crisis era!) and acceleration was abysmal. Top speed was a claimed 157 km/h - but it took a while to get there.
It's not the only strange Australian/Japanese automotive offering in the Land of the Rising Sun back in the '70s. How about the Isuzu Statesman? As the name suggests, this was a HQ Holden Statesman rebadged as an Isuzu for the domestic Japanese market - and with golfing star Jack Nicklaus promoting the car in Isuzu's ads!