Wankel engines first saw use in production cars as early as 1964 — and not even in a Mazda, but rather in an NSU. That little single-rotor powerplant quickly evolved into the more typical two-rotor ...

Ask most people what a rotary engine is, and they'll describe a Mazda RX-7 with a triangular rotor spinning inside a housing, combustion happening in sequence as the rotor moves rather than across a ...