The Wankel, better known as the rotary engine, has always held a unique place in the world of performance cars. Compact, lightweight, and capable of high revs, a rotary offered an alternative to ...

Chinese firm Dongan Auto revives the Wankel engine, developing a lightweight prototype aimed at next-gen aerial mobility ...

Mazda's famous rotary engine finally made its big return last year, but it wasn't under the hood of a replacement for the RX-8. In fact, it wasn't even in a performance car at all. Instead, it served ...

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 ...

In the 1920s, Felix Wankel thought that the conventional approach to engine design was not complicated enough and so, in a classic case of thinking outside the box, came up with his novel rotary ...

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, ...

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 ...

The traditional piston engine has garnered the vast majority of attention and application in the internal combustion age, but there was another: the Wankel rotary engine. German engineer Felix Wankel ...

Almost every internal combustion vehicle on the planet today uses the classic piston engine. These run by converting heat energy into reciprocating motion, and then rotary motion that ultimately ...