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Mazda Stops Production of the Last Rotary Engine Powered Car
Hugh Pickens writes "After a 45-year production run, Mazda Motor Corp announced that the latest edition of the Mazda RX-8 will end production in June 2012. The Japanese automaker ... introduced its first rotary engine car in 1967 and is the only automaker in the world that makes rotary engine vehicles, once the darling of the automotive industry. Such engines have fewer moving parts and are quieter than comparable piston engines but are more expensive to manufacture and consume more fuel. Cumulative sales of Mazda vehicles with rotary engines total about 1.995 million but Mazda sold only 2,896 RX-8 cars last year, with 1,245 of them in North America and 963 in Japan. 'Although R-X production is ending, the rotary engine will always represent the spirits of Mazda, and Mazda remains committed to its ongoing development,' says Mazda Chief Executive and President Takashi Yamanouchi recalling the victory of Mazda's rotary engine at Le Mans 20 years ago... Mazda does not have flashy green technologies in its lineup that its bigger Japanese rivals do — such as the hybrids at Toyota Motor Corp. or electric vehicles at Nissan Motor Co. The fading away of its prized rotary engine — although largely symbolic — is yet another blow."
Mazda sold only 2,896 RX-8 cars last year, with 1,245 of them in North America and 963 in Japan. Cumulative sales of Mazda vehicles with rotary engines total about 1.995 million as of the end of August
Unless my math is off, it looks like final cumulative sales will fall just short of 2 million cars:
2,896 cars/year is 241.33 cars/month; even assuming the end is on 30 June that means only 10 more months of production -- a total of 2413.33 cars -- for a cumulative total of 1.9974 million (only to the precision of the starting "about" 1.995 million, of course). Man, just one year short. Maybe there will be enough sympathy sales that final year to put them over the top?
I need to get out more.
I love my RX-7! The rotary engine is really an engineering marvel. Too bad they never had the resources to work on the efficiency like everyone did with piston engines.
I was saving for years to be able to buy an RX-9 if/when it hit the market (Which has been rumored for years, and supposedly was coming near to release in the next few years... guess that wasn't the case).
So long, wankel!
(I'll still continue to love and drive my RX-7, of course...)
Like a million apex seals cried out in unison, and were then ejected from the tailpipe.
I read the internet for the articles.
The Mazda rotaries have traditionally worn out prematurely (needing rebuilds after 80-100k because of oil leaks), and they get relatively poor fuel economy. The design has a slightly higher power/weight ratio, but that specific advantage doesn't outweigh the many disadvantages.
I'm watching the MYT engine, which is a swing-piston engine. Raphial doesn't want to sell out to someone who'd kill it or bury it, and hasn't found anyone to loan him enough to get his factory off the ground.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Its not all that great for a sports car. The other downside is it consumes more oil and requires a rebuild every so many miles. From an engineering standpoint it make more sense. Why convert the opposing force of the pistons to a rotation when you could generate the rotation force itself?
Now given the choice would I drive one? Hell yeah.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
So does a 2-stroke, and it's definitely less efficient.
Godaddy is a scam and a ripoff.
The displacement number in rotary engines is quite misleading. The design is so different than a piston based engine that it's not a fair comparison. You're getting more power because you're getting more power strokes per rotation. Because you're getting more power strokes, you're doing more intake strokes (more fuel). So while power/displacement ratio is better, that doesn't necessarily affect the power/fuel ratio at all.
Not only that, but the triangle is spinning inside a peanut!
Who *wouldn't* want a triangle-peanut powered car?
$4 a gallon is still one of the cheapest fuel prices on the planet, by a huge margin.
It's one of the cheapest in the developed world, yes. But places like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela subsidise petrol heavily, resulting in absurdly cheap fuel.
The big advantage is that it is lighter per BHP than the equivalent piston engine, and can be revved up higher. They have fewer moving parts, but a far more complex problem with sealing than regular piston engines do, and thus tend to be less efficient and burn more oil in the real world. Plus, modern piston engines are balanced so well that the RPM differences aren't what they used to be.
I read the internet for the articles.
technology coming down the pike. the new diesels look especially intriguing. And it appears the rotary isn't dead, it's just restin'.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Reality check, the upcoming CX5 will be far and away the most fuel efficient AWD vehicle available in North America when it's introduced later this year. In 2013 (2014 model year) if they bring the Skyactiv diesel to the US like they've announced then you will be able to get an ~42mpg AWD crossover. They are doing this without the very expensive and environmentally dubious hybrid or electric drivetrains, just good old fashioned engineering.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
The advantages of the rotary engine are power (relative to weight) and simplicity. Even though the rotary engine has fewer moving parts than a piston engine, service life is LESS. In theory, IF there were many manufacturers competing and making interchangeable parts, rotary engines might become cheap enough to be disposable. But with Mazda as the only game in town, forget it.
As engines evolved, people discovered it was easier to reduce the weight of a piston engine than to build a long-life rotary engine. Of all the components that can fail in a car, the pistons, engine blocks, rings, rods, valves, fuel injectors, and camshafts are normally good for the life of the vehicle. With the possible exception of timing belts, the simplicity of the rotary engine does not translate to lower maintenance cost because the admittedly complicated piston engines are generally quite reliable.
Could someone provide a car analogy to explain?
My userid is prime!
That's a good explanation.
The other problem with rotary engines is that they're rare and therefore a lot of mechanics don't know how to work on them. In some areas, you're pretty much limited to going to the dealership for service, which is usually a lot more expensive than an independent. So in a nutshell, they might make more power in a smaller space, but they cost more both in mileage and maintenance.
Their big advantage (at least, the big advantage I perceived back in the 80's when I was drooling at the RX-7) is that because the engine can be smaller, the whole car can be lower, because you don't have to have the hood as high as you would to cover an equivalent-power piston engine. That advantage has been negated by all the pedestrian safety laws which require the front end of a car to be high enough that if you hit someone, they won't cartwheel into the windshield. Since the hood has to be that high anyway, you don't get any stylistic advantage from a more compact engine.
"I disagree with you" does not equal "flamebait."
For all of the sturm and drang on Slashdot regarding patents and how they impede progress, how could they have gone unmentioned in a discussion of the rotary engine?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
When I go to the track with mine and open the hood all the V8 drivers are ready to race. They see the tiny engine and just know they are going to spank it. When reality sets in and the big V8 gets spanked properly by my 1.1 liter rotary engine (in a Jap car) they start screaming about how rotaries suck and power to weight and blah blah but they lose. What they don't know is that I am squeezing 761HP out of a 1.1 liter in 1700 lb car. I am quick to tell them that it is a 1.1 liter engine though. And yes they are loud as hell not quieter. And I have never had an engine blown while racing. Build it properly and don't lean it out and you wont blow it that easily. I have seen rods go flying out of piston engines and catastrophic blower disasters from V8s though and yes waiting for those to clean up can be a drag.
It's kind of as if the computer engineering world had taken a look at the first integrated circuits (also "IC," by an interesting coincidence) and said, "we need to do this with vacuum tubes." No doubt we'd have all kinds of cool miniaturized vacuum tube technology we don't have today, but there's little doubt that computers would still be horribly bulky, slow, and expensive compared to what we actually got.
Well, the whole integrated circuit theory pre-dates transistors, it just wasn't terribly practical with hollow state. (in the later years, you could make the whole circuit contained in the above much smaller than the "integrated-tube", so... not so useful).
But regardless, since the 30's it was common to put two discrete tubes in a common package, and by the end of the road TVs used a lot of awesomely named 'compactrons' which had as many as four, tubes in one envelope. Which isn't really an IC, but more like some of the transistor arrays in a single DIP package, I suppose.
They also had... wtf were they called. A little ceramic sheet with several passives in it, that replace all the normally used discrete components for coupling two tubes. They were pretty plagued with problems though.
The old IBM stuff had tube plug in modules, flip flops, inverters and so on, the whole circuit was socketed. Then they did the same thing with transistors, smaller and more reliable. Then they integrated it at the die level instead of the card level, seems like logical progression.
too much ramble...
Sent from my PDP-11
It would be good to see a fair and equal race, pistons vs rotary, on the Le Mans circuit. Given that it's R&D that has limited the rotary engine, another idea would be to allow F1 use rotary engines of equal horsepower to the piston engines currently used. (Mixed formulas have been used before, for example when turbos were phased out over several seasons.) If anyone can afford to develop a high-performance high-reliability rotary engine, it would be a F1 team. You'd need to allow F1 teams to use the weight difference for extra fuel, at least for the first year or so, but once the engines became equal in fuel consumption then rotary would hold the advantage as you could run a lighter car at the start.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Does this mean that the last car will never be finished?
Not a triangle but a Reuleaux triangle.
Not inside a peanut but inside an epitrochoid.
C'mon, don't those sound cooler than triangle and peanut?
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Mazda is just not producing anymore renesis rotary engines. Does not mean they are not producing a new rotary engine. "Thank you so much for all your supportive messages concerning the RX-8 and the rotary engine! We are also excited. Mazda is aiming to achieve a breakthrough with the ‘Skyactiv’ technology, and we are zealously working on new models to house the next generation rotary engine. Thank you for your continued support!" http://carscoop.blogspot.com/2011/10/mazda-pr-tweets-that-company-is-working.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Carscoop+(CARSCOOP) This article is so wrong on so many levels that its funny.
Its a 1981 first gen RX-7. Peripheral ported 12A 2rotor (smallblock) motor 1.1lr, Borg Warner(tractor trailer) turbo trimmed running E85 fuel. The motor was peripheral ported. The motor was also pinned because they tend to twist/warp once you go above 500HP. The car went on an extreme diet to shave 600lb from the stock body weight including carbon fiber front clip. Its still a street car though. Bear in mind though the 4rotor you mentioned produces 600Hp normally aspirated out the box. The 761 Dyno run was at 37psi boost. We plan to upgrade to a 3 rotor eventually I already sourced the engine. BTW E85 is awesome magic fuel, after a run the engine still feels coool to the touch and it allows the boost to be pushed way up and run the engine leaner without detonation.