Unexceptional Classifieds: Mazda 929 Coupe

Price: £3950
Mileage: 118,000 kilometres (73,000 miles approx)
Condition: Used but original
Advert: eBay

If the idea of spotting another example of the car you’re driving fills you with dread, then your ultimate car must surely be something like the Mazda 929 Coupe. Automotive resource Howmanyleft doesn’t separate out the coupe from its saloon variant, nor distinguish between generations, but even being very generous, there may be just three 929s left in all of the UK.

You could own one of them, too, as we’ve found this 1984 929 2.0 Coupe for sale on eBay. As if to illustrate its rarity, it wasn’t even a UK car originally, having been bought in Saudi Arabia before being shipped to the UK in 1986, dry-stored for 24 years, then recently recommissioned.

While that does mean it’s left-hand drive, that probably doesn’t matter so much given the car’s rarity – sit around waiting for a right-hand-drive one and it could be years or even decades before another pops up. Given the scarcity of 929s, though, a price of under four grand seems pretty reasonable even for a car that’s not in pristine condition.

Some background, though, because there’s a reasonable chance you’ve not even seen a 929 Coupe before. It was, for the longest time, Mazda’s range-topping model, from 1973 until 1997. The earliest 929s are somewhat generic looking 1970s saloons, estates, and coupes, and the third-generation ‘HB’ 929 sold between 1981 and 1987 is even blander in saloon form, but the coupe you see here is much more distinctive.

That’s largely thanks to its glassy cabin, and the use of retractable or ‘pop-up’ front headlights – and no mere 7-inch or rectangular units either, but under each lid is a duo of smaller rectangular lights, one of only a handful of cars we can think of with more than one lamp hidden away like that.

The interior was, and is, a little more imaginative than the 1980s Japanese norm, too, with a cockpit-like layout that places most controls just a fingertip-stretch away from the wheel rim. The enormous headlight and washer buttons either side of the instrument cluster are almost Citroën-like, while the cluster itself uses a combined analogue and LCD layout, with illuminating segments for the speedometer and tachometer.

Despite the car’s rarity, your author has actually driven a 929 Coupe. In some ways, it feels like the generic 1980s large-car experience, with neat but not especially agile handling, an engine that gets on with business without delivering a punch to the kidneys, and a ride that’s pliant on tall sidewalls and relatively soft springs, but not truly wafty. But it still feels special, the expansive glass area, the digital gauges, and the car’s unusual looks all contributing to the feel-good factor of driving something unique. Good gearshift, too – the same mechanism was used, albeit in modified form, when Mazda developed the original MX-5.

The 929 Coupe would no doubt be even more interesting in its other form: the Wankel rotary-engined Cosmo, some of which even came with turbocharging, though with either the old 12A or 13B rotary engines fitted, it would elevate what’s probably quite an easy car for the average enthusiast to keep running into something altogether more specialised.

The car for sale looks good to us and seems mostly tidy inside and out. Well within the scope of a light resto we reckon, and thanks to its rarity, a car well worth preserving and cherishing for as long as possible.