Antique & Classic Cars Blog

Many of you may have read that Mazda is celebrating its rotary-engined car’s 40th anniversary this year. (Hallmark probably has a card for it.) Engineers have been intrigued by rotary movement, as opposed to the reciprocating piston that dominates the world’s internal combustion vehicle production, because of its smoothness and smaller number of moving parts.

While the crankshaft spins–a simple motion–a traditional piston comes to a stop at the top and the bottom of the cylinder with every revolution. In a conventional automobile idling at 1,000 RPMs, every piston is being hurled into motion and stopped dead again two thousand times per minute. That’s a lot of wasted momentum and a lot of herky-jerky activity to dampen for a smooth ride.

The rotary avoids the stop-go-stop-go nature of the regular piston engine, but it is not without its drawbacks. Just when manufacturers were getting excited about the technology in the 1970s, gasoline prices began to rise and emissions requirements grew more stringent. The rotary of the day was not very clean or fuel efficient, so most manufacturers backed off.

Mazda didn’t and its RX7 sports car became a runaway sensation for the company. The third generation of that model was twin-turbocharged, had smoking sexy lines, and could back them up with outstanding performance. The technology is very sophisticated though and a limited number of mechanics able to fix them properly has been cited as the company’s reason for discontinuing that model in the US. Sales continued in Japan and the car’s popularity held strong here among “tuners.” The 3rd gen RX7 features prominently in the Fast & The Furious films (and is on my wife’s short list of cool cars she’d like to climb into at the end of the work day).

This entry was posted on Friday, November 16th, 2007 at 10:14 am and is filed under Car parts, Car stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.