SyntheticBlinkerFluid wrote:
I'm just glad that Mazda hasn't and probably won't give up on the Rotary. They have dumped millions if not billions in the development if the Rotary engine. I can only hope for a better engine soon. Realize that it's still young compared to the piston engine in development.
As of late however, I am coming across people who think Mazda should dump the Rotary all together, they feel it's a waste of time. But these people seem to also be the ones that think Porsche shouldn't be running horizontally-opposed engines out back and that it was great when Jeep dumped the ancient 4.0L six.
The reality is that the rotary is inherently flawed from a thermodynamics standpoint, period. It's BSFC performance would not equal the piston engine, even if an equal amount of development had been poured into it. You just can't cheat physics.
Now, I'm not knocking the rotary or saying that it should not exist. But it finds itself increasingly out of place in todays automotive marketplace due to various government standards and consumer expectations and proclivities.
The rotary mythology that seems obligatorily to begin EVERY-SINGLE RX-related magazine article, that the rotary makes -HP with only so many liters and makes more HP/weight than a piston engine, is just hyperbole, to put it kindly. A 13B is not 1.3 liters and the rotary is heavier than you'd think.
The only real objective advantages I see in the rotary are related to packaging. And subjectively, you have the zingy "rotary character" and the "oddball factor." Now obviously, only a very small subset of consumers find that those "advantages" justify dealing with the poor mpg and "special needs" that come with the rotary. So, there really is no good business case for the rotary. They would probably be better positioned as a company if all the resources they have poured into the rotary since the FD ceased production had been instead invested in other things. Mazda sticks with it because they love it.
