Although there was briefly a company called Rotary Rocket, the term is much better known as a nickname for the Mazda RX-7 — one of the few cars that used a Wankel, or rotary, engine. If you ever ...

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 ...

When you take a look back at the extensive timeline of the automobile, there are plenty of brands that have a particular affinity with a certain type of engineering solution or technology. Think of ...

Rotary engines (also known as Wankel engines and Wankel rotary engines) are quite different from piston or "reciprocating" engines. One of the distinguishing features is that they don't need valves to ...

While most people might know rotary engines for their use in cars, a pair of companies made use of them in chainsaws — and ...

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links. Mazda and NSU tend to get all the credit for Wankel rotary engines in cars, but Mercedes also did quite a bit of Wankel development, using the ...

Kennedy is not just another writer. Since the early 2000s, before televisions were a thing in every household, he enjoyed his dad's stories of the Safari Rally cars. He finally got a chance to attend ...

The inline configuration is arguably the most common automotive engine design for plenty of reasons, including simplicity and the low cost of producing these motors. We also have plants with the ...

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 ...

For more than a decade the name Wankel has popped up whenever car enthusiasts start talking about advanced-design automotive powerplants. The theory of the Wankel engine goes back to 1954 when Dr.