Mazda Luce Rotary Coupe

Build instructions

What you'll need: 200-250 gsm paper or cardstock, scissors or a craft knife, a ruler and glue stick.

• Print the PDF at actual size (100%, do not scale to fit page) on 200-250 gsm paper.
• Cut out each piece along the solid lines.
• Score the dashed lines with a ruler for precise folds.
• Glue the pieces in the numbered order on each sheet, working from the body outward to the details.
• Let each joint dry before moving on to the next piece.

About the Mazda Luce Rotary Coupe

The Luce Rotary Coupe combined elegant styling from the Italian Bertone studio with Mazda's emerging rotary technology, in a grand tourer rarely seen outside Japan.

History and trivia

The Luce debuted in 1966 as Mazda's upmarket sedan, but it was the 1969 version that made the name famous outside Japan: the Luce Rotary Coupe, a two-door grand tourer styled by Giorgetto Giugiaro during his time at the Italian design house Bertone. Under the hood sat the twin-rotor 13A engine, a direct descendant of the rotary program that had begun with the Cosmo Sport a few years earlier, making the Luce Coupe one of the first proofs that Wankel technology could work in a luxury grand tourer, not just in compact sports cars.

Production was very limited, with fewer than 1,000 units built, making it extremely rare today even among collectors who specialize in Mazda's history. Its design featured hidden dual headlights and a notably sleek roofline for the period, details later echoed in other Japanese grand tourers of the 1970s. The Luce Rotary Coupe is regarded as a key link between Mazda's earliest rotary experiments and the later "R"-badged model family, such as the R100 and RX-2, which would spread rotary technology internationally.