Developing a gasoline-powered rotary engine was a dream for Felix Wankel, and we mean that literally. Some steam engines worked on the same basic principle as far back as the 18th century, but the ...

You hear endless myths about the Mazda RX-7, from breathless praise of its “magic” to horror stories about blown apex seals.

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, ...

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 ...

Language is an imperfect medium, but it's what we've got, so let's go with it. Determining the swept volume of inventor Felix Wankel's rotary engine can generate more arguments than claiming what a GT ...

There are a lot of strange automotive designs out there, but this defunct engine from the '70s may just be the weirdest one you've ever seen.

The X-Engine technology used in the XTS-210 is a direct drive rotary approach that can be viewed as an "inverted" Wankel engine. It has a trochoidal rotor with a three-lobed housing, but it utilizes a ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...