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 ...

When Mazda discontinued the RX-8, most people assumed the rotary engine was finished. The RX-8 was the last production car to use Mazda's signature Wankel rotary, and its departure seemed to signal ...

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 ...

We live in an age of downsizing in the automotive world. Super and hypercar manufacturers like McLaren and Ferrari are ditching big-capacity, high-cylinder count engines in favor of boosted V6 and V8 ...

Perfectly tuning the heat range of an engine's spark plugs is something of a dark art to all but the most well versed tuners and the engineering egg heads at automotive OEMs. Getting the spark plug ...

Mazda’s rotary engine is coming back in the spotlight, but this time it’s not just a nostalgic callback to the RX-7 glory days. Instead, it’s quietly shaping the brand’s electrified future. Rather ...

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 ...

Kenichi Yamamoto, who led the engineering team that produced a commercially viable rotary engine at what is now known as Mazda Motor Co. and later became its president and chairman, died Dec. 20 in ...