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, ...

Rotary engines tend to conjure images of a few famous sports cars, yet a surprising number of coupes, sedans, concepts, and even workhorses quietly packed spinning triangles under their hoods. By ...

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 ...

Getting the balance right in a sports car is harder than it sounds. Power without handling produces something fast in a ...

Wankel engines first saw use in production cars as early as 1964 — and not even in a Mazda, but rather in an NSU. That little single-rotor powerplant quickly evolved into the more typical two-rotor ...

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, ...

Alina has been enthusiastic about vehicles her entire life, and even from an early age found herself itching to get behind the wheel. Through high school and college, she could be found reading ...

The Mazda RX-7 is the sports car that made the rotary engine cool. Like really, really cool. It powered the RX-7 for 24 years ...

The Mazda Iconic SP sports car concept was first shown at the 2023 Japan Mobility Show. The two-seater in Viola Red with 2+2 interior space was promised as a production car, similar in design, in the ...

The rotary was the most radical rethink of the combustion engine in over a hundred years — and it paid the price for being different. Mazda introduced the innovative Wankel rotary engine in the 1967 ...

The challenge isn’t building a fast rotary car. It’s building one that ordinary people can afford without sacrificing what makes it special. Mazda continues exploring rotary engine sports cars, ...

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 ...