The internal combustion engine, for all its mechanical sophistication, still runs on a 19th-century mechanical idea: pistons rising and falling, a crankshaft spinning, a steam-age architecture ...

There are three certainties in life: death, taxes, and Mazda’s obsession with the rotary engine. No matter how market trends change, how regulations tighten, or how quickly electrification advances, ...

In a world dominated by pistons, the rotary engine was something different for motorists. It was the vision of German engineer Felix Wankel, built on the belief that the up-and-down motion of pistons ...

Every story dealing with a new rotary engine from Mazda lands in a different place on the matrix of possibilities between “Coming soon!” and “Never gonna happen!” In 2011 it was speculated that the ...

Chris Bruce has worked in the automotive industry since 2011 and has written thousands of stories about cars, motorsports, and motorcycles in that time. He has written for Autoblog, Autoviva, CarFax, ...

Wankel rotary engine powered thousands of aircraft. One of several problems: It spewed castor oil on its pilots.

Most car enthusiasts associate the term “rotary engine” with Felix Wankel’s invention, developed in the 1950s and most commonly associated with Mazda. However, more than half a century before the ...

Rob Dahm, notorious rotary-powered car builder, has firmly jumped into the deep end of the pool with his latest project: The world's only 15.7-liter, tri-turbo Y12 rotary engine. If that doesn't make ...

Click to open image viewer. The first successful rotary engine is generally attributed to the American F.O. Farwell in 1896; but the French Gnome, developed by the Seguin brothers, was much more ...

The Wankel rotary engine is known for its troubled life in the mainstream automotive industry, its high power-to-weight ratio, and the intoxicating buzz it makes at full tilt. Popular with die-hard ...

Powering down the tarmac of the Salinas Airport, surrounded by the parked private jets that ferried some subset of the ultra-wealthy into the Monterey Peninsula for so-called Car Week, I get that ...

Perfectly tuning the heat range of an engine's spark plugs is something of a dark art to all but the most well versed tuners and the engineering egg heads at automotive OEMs. Getting the spark plug ...