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, ...

Pop the hood on a classic Mazda RX-7 or RX-8 and the engine bay looks oddly empty. That is the charm of the rotary engine: a compact lump of metal that trades pistons and valves for a spinning ...

Rim-driven thrusters turn the normal propeller-motor arrangement inside out; rather than mounting the motor at the center of the propeller, they use a large hollow motor, with the blades attached to ...

What's the first thought that comes to your mind when someone says Corvette? For some, it's a white Corvette C4 driven by Burt Reynolds as he drives off into the sunset in a glorious V8 symphony.

While modern engines feature many tweaks and improvements on the original ideas, they usually aren't as interesting as the strange contraptions engineers experimented with in the early days. Take, for ...

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 ...

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 ...