Cosmotologist: a strange, pistonless engine in a strange-looking sports car proves to be an irresistible combination

摘要

I've always been attracted to engineering oddities. You know, things that get the job done in a different way than most. And I'm especially partial to out-of-the-ordinary engines. So it just seems natural that sooner or later I'd own a car with a rotary engine. And I do: a Mazda Cosmo Sport. "A what?" you say. The two-seat Cosmo is a '60s-era small sports car powered by a 110-hp, two-rotor Wankel engine. The rotary was the brainchild of Felix Wankel, a self-taught German tinkerer who never went to college. He made the first rotary prototype in the late '50s for NSU, a German motorcycle and car manufacturer eventually bought out by Volkswagen. For a while in the '60s, it looked to some like the rotary would be the engine: light, small and only a handful of parts. Several carmakers paid Wankel for the rights to use the rotary. But they all ran into the same problem: The seals on the edges of the rotors didn't last. As the seals wore, power went down while fuel consumption and emissions went up.