The Mazda 787B carved its name into motorsport history in 1991 as the first Japanese car to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans overall. Even more legendary was its powertrain, a screaming 2.6-liter ...

The rotary engine was an unconventional design that delivered great power for its size. Here's what's good and bad about it.

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 ...

Not only has the 2023 Mazda MX-30 R-EV rotary plug-in hybrid been revealed, it’s now in production, truly making it a reality. Production started Thursday. This is a momentous event since Mazda hasn’t ...

Chris Bruce has worked in the automotive industry since 2011 and has written thousands of stories about cars, motorsports, and motorcycles in that time. He has written for Autoblog, Autoviva, CarFax, ...

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 ...

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, ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Peter Lyon is based in Tokyo and writes about the car industry. At the Japan Mobility Show two years ago, Mazda unveiled a ...

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 ...

A Wankel engine is a type of rotary engine, but not all rotary engines are Wankel engines. Wrapping your mind around this idea will help you to better understand the similarities as well as the ...

MX-30 R-EV is the only car in the world with a rotary engine A lot of people who love cars have been sniffy about the MX-30 eSkyactiv R-EV (and if ever a car needed a better and shorter name, this is ...

Long before Felix Wankel became synonymous with rotary engines, an inventive Hungarian-American engineer named Stephen M. Balzer secured one of the earliest patents for a rotary-powered automobile on ...