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 ...

The rotary engine, previously a staple in Mazda's lineup, is an engine design that foregoes the round piston and singular chamber of a regular reciprocal internal combustion engine. Instead, the ...

Rotary engines made their biggest impact in Mazda sports cars, but a recent episode of "Jay Leno's Garage" delves into the rotary's earlier history. Before it was popularized by Mazda, the rotary ...

The rotary engine, with its egg-like block and triangular rotor, is an oddball even among all the other oddball engine designs—sorry, three-cylinder, twin-turbo, camless Koenigsegg, ya basic. That ...

For a time, the Wankel rotary engine seemed like the future. In 1963, German automaker NSU—later absorbed into Audi—debuted the Wankel Spider, the first internal-combustion production car not powered ...

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 ...

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 ...

The 1970s were full of strange automotive experiments, but few were as unlikely as a compact Japanese pickup powered by a screaming rotary engine. Mazda’s Rotary Engine Pickup, better known as the ...

Joshua is an automotive enthusiast who explores every facet of car culture. With a history of over 30 vehicles, his love for Japanese tuner cars shines. Beyond ownership, he dives into every vehicle, ...