Pop the hood on a classic Mazda RX-7 or RX-8 and the engine bay looks oddly empty. That is the charm of the rotary engine: a compact lump of metal that trades pistons and valves for a spinning ...

Not every engine has a set of pistons that move up and down in a cylinder. The Wankel, or rotary engine, delivers its power with rotational force rather than a reciprocating mass that hammers out ...

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 ...

There have only been a handful of rotary engine-powered cars, and most of them start with "Mazda." While fascinating and not without their benefits, rotary engines are pretty inefficient, don't make a ...

When it comes to unconventional engine design, few exceed the Wankel rotary in terms of weirdness. Despite that, the same basic principles of internal combustion apply here: Fuel and air are mixed and ...

While modern engines feature many tweaks and improvements on the original ideas, they usually aren't as interesting as the strange contraptions engineers experimented with in the early days. Take, for ...