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 ...

You hear endless myths about the Mazda RX-7, from breathless praise of its “magic” to horror stories about blown apex seals.

How weird and wonderful is the rotary engine, with its rebellious "why can't we do it like this" approach to automotive engineering? The rotary represents a compact, smooth, and quite mechanically ...

The Mazda RX-8 has always had a cult following, but the rotary engine can scare off buyers who want something simpler to live ...

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, ...

Gilbert Smith is an automotive journalist with over five years of specialized research and writing experience. Before joining CarBuzz in 2024, he produced in-depth buyer’s guides and feature articles ...

We live in an age of downsizing in the automotive world. Super and hypercar manufacturers like McLaren and Ferrari are ditching big-capacity, high-cylinder count engines in favor of boosted V6 and V8 ...

Astron aerospace has shown a partial prototype of a new rotary combustion engine it claims runs at an extraordinary 60% thermal efficiency, burning totally clean with zero NOx emissions and nothing ...

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

Sure, the rotary engine may be an oil-eating machine filled with Nazi-designed spinning tortilla chips that turn money into nightmares, but god, I love them. My first car was an RX-7, and while, ...