Mazda kills the rotary engine after a 45-year production run that included powering the first and only Japanese car to win the 24-hour Le Mans endurance race.
The Japanese automaker, based in Hiroshima, introduced its first rotary engine car in 1967 and is the only automaker in the world that makes rotary engine vehicles. Such engines have fewer moving parts and are quieter than comparable piston engines but are more expensive to manufacture and consume more fuel.
The RX-8 is the only model in Mazda’s lineup with the rotary engine.
The piston-less Wankel rotary engine is… odd.
Wankels have one huge problem — efficiency. The efficiency issue comes from the fact that no one has indentified a way to get high enough compression out of the design to get good efficiency out of it.
It’s a sad day. But as sweet as the rotary engine is to drive, BMW, Honda and the like have shown that you can rev just as smoothly with a more conventional design. And being more conventional means that the various national laws are written to suit it, that mechanics know how to maintain it, and that there are tens of thousands of engineers around the world, each pushing to extend the reliability, performance, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of the piston design by 1% here, 0.5% there.
One division of one company just couldn’t keep up with a whole industry.
And Goober, there’s a simple solution to low compression ratios: lots of boost. ;)
Dr. Pat, agreed, boost can solve a lot of problems, but then you have the problem of increased NOX emissions. It isn’t easy, is what I’m saying, and since, like you said, you can make a recip piston engine do the same stuff a Wankel can do without having to reinvent the wheel, Wwankels have gone the way of the dodo. The wankel was different, but it wasn’t considerably better, so it died. Different doesn’t cut it. Only better can replace a paradigm as entrenched as recip piston ICE technology.
Meanwhile, Audi claims it will bring out a Wankel engine as part of a hybrid version of their A1. So the dodo lives on.