Mazda made a splash in the market in 1990, launching the Eunos Cosmo with the three-rotor 20B engine. Compared with contemporary Wankel rotary engines, the 20B's extra rotor beefed the compact ...

Mazda’s 13B rotary engine did more than power a string of sports cars. It forced an entire engineering department to think differently about combustion, packaging, and character, and it left a mark on ...

The engine in question was the Wankel rotary, named after German engineer Felix Wankel, who first patented the concept in 1929. Instead of pistons moving back and forth, the rotary engine used a ...

Everyone generally knows about piston and rotary engines, with many a flamewar having been waged over the pros and cons of each design. The “correct” answer is thus to combine both into a single ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

Designed and championed by self-taught engineer Felix Wankel, the rotary engine is now most closely associated with Japanese automaker Mazda. Many of the greatest Mazdas ever made, including the RX-7 ...

The electric motor might carry the hype banner at the moment, but some minds remain convinced that there's plenty of innovation left to be extracted from internal combustion. AIE is one of the rotary ...