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 ...

In theory, Wankel-style rotary internal combustion engines have many advantages: they ditch the cumbersome crankcase and piston design, replacing it with a simple, single-chamber design and a thick, ...

When it comes to unique engine designs, one of the most prolific is the trusty rotary configuration. Instead of featuring a number of spherical cylinders moving up and down like in most internal ...

Long before Felix Wankel became synonymous with rotary engines, an inventive Hungarian-American engineer named Stephen M. Balzer secured one of the earliest patents for a rotary-powered automobile on ...

Almost every internal combustion vehicle on the planet today uses the classic piston engine. These run by converting heat energy into reciprocating motion, and then rotary motion that ultimately ...

In the early '90s, Mazda's rotary-powered RX-7 was the quintessential Japanese two-seat sports car. But then the Miata arrived and changed the game.

If there's one thing forever associated with the Wankel rotary engine, it's Mazda. Powering production vehicles from the Cosmo's launch in May 1967 to the last RX-8 leaving the plant in June 2012, the ...

4 Reasons Why The Rotary Engine Is Dead. The Wankel engine was last seen in a production car in the Mazda RX-8, and currently there are no rotary engines in production. Mazda may bring it back in the ...

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