50 YEARS OF CHALLENGING CONVENTION – MAZDA
In a world dominated by piston-powered cylinder engines,the rotary engine by designed by Mazda, provides an unique take on internal combustion engines
In a world dominated by piston-powered cylinder engines, the rotary engine provides an unique take on internal combustion engines. The rotary engine has been around since 1951 when it was first developed by Felix Wankel in Germany also giving it the name “Wankel Engine”.
Mazda licensed the technology from Felix Wankel and his company NSU Motorenwerke AG and Wankel GmbH’s. At this point of time, Mazda was trying to find its footing in the mushrooming Japanese automobile industry. They needed a distinguishing factor to have a distinct recall in the consumer’s mind. The Wankel engine was going to be Mazda’s differentiator, although a number of other automobile companies had already tried to implement this idea and failed. Things didn’t begin too well for Mazda either. The first test with the imported Wankel engine from NSU Motorenwerke AG and Wankel GmbH’s ended up with the engine seizing within its first hour of testing itself. Far from accepting defeat, the chief engineer at Mazda, Kenichi Yamamoto, assembled a team of Mazda’s most talented engineers also known as the 47 Samurais’ to troubleshoot the problem and build reliability into the rotary engine.
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Great innovators of cars, and different from the mainstream