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 ...

Wankel rotary engine powered thousands of aircraft. One of several problems: It spewed castor oil on its pilots.

The rotary engine has been a Mazda staple since 1967. It powered one of the most famous and eccentric Japanese sports car line-ups, the RX-series, until 2012 when Mazda discontinued pure ...

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 ...

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 ...

Alina has been enthusiastic about vehicles her entire life, and even from an early age found herself itching to get behind the wheel. Through high school and college, she could be found reading ...

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 ...

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 ...

Rotary engines tend to conjure images of a few famous sports cars, yet a surprising number of coupes, sedans, concepts, and even workhorses quietly packed spinning triangles under their hoods. By ...