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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...