The invention of the Wankel rotary triggered a gold rush among the world’s automakers to acquire licences (see pages 80–81). Was the new Wankel rotary engine destined to be the future for personal transportation – or, as Chrysler’s engineering boss Alan Loofbourrow predicted, would it turn out to be ‘one of the most unbelievable fantasies ever to hit the world auto industry’?
General Motors saw it as the way ahead and thought so much of its new industrial secret that it cautioned, ‘careless disclosure is detrimental, not only to the corporation, but to … the employees themselves in a direct and personal way’. However, climbing oil prices and concern about emissions soon caused GM to drop the project, while NSU’s pioneering Wankel Ro 80 car ran into deep trouble in Germany with serial engine failure caused by the compression seals of its units.
However, Toyo Kogyo (today Mazda) in Japan, alone among carmakers, kept to the belief that the Wankel could make a viable rotary engine through painstaking development. Even so, its researchers were sorely tried. ‘Our top management courageously adopted a courageous mentality’ was the very Japanese comment from chief engineer Kenichi Yamamoto on the years of trouble during which ‘it was necessary to try out every possible material available on this earth’.
The culmination of this perseverance was the RX7 – reliable, fast and uncannily smooth, but also a curious comment on the nature of technological successions. Yet the Wankel cannot be written off, for social needs change and so do fuels. Mazda claim that its motor can burn hydrogen more efficiently and safely than regular piston engines, while not requiring the rare catalysts needed to use hydrogen in a fuel cell.
Like a Galapagos turtle, the Mazda rotary-engined car has been pursuing its own lonely and particular development. Only time will show if it is an evolutionary dead end.