History is littered with overhyped technologies. From nuclear power that didn’t provide electricity too cheap to meter to blockchain that really doesn’t do… anything, many intelligent people have bought into hyperbole of products that were worse than what they were supposed to replace. The auto industry went through that wave in the early 1970s, with costly consequences.
Felix Wankel was an engineer from his childhood days. I’m going to ignore his support for the Nazis because that’s not really relevant to this. He had long conceived of a better automobile engine. When he was hired by NSU in the 1950s, he could make his dreams come true. In 1957, he built the first prototype of his Rotary engine
His engine had no pistons, instead it had a triangular rotar which spun in an oblong housing. The engine was lightweight, compact, smooth, and had few moving parts. That got people interested.
By 1972, the wankel engine was, if you believed prognosicators, the engine of the future.
Many automakers bought into the hype. French automaker Citroen built an entire factory for their birotor, which was first put in the a high performance version of the GS compact. Mercedes Benz developed a wedge-shaped mid engined supercar with a 3 rotor wankel. Mazda, the company best known for it, had largely abandoned piston engines by 1973 and was selling rotary versions of pretty much everything, including pickup trucks. But perhaps nobody invested more in it than that elephant in the room, General Motors. In 1973, the company had reportedly stopped all development on new piston engines, and their VP John DeLorean said that by the 1980s, the company would be 80 to 100% rotary powered. The first GM rotary engine was to go into a sporty version of the Vega known as the Monza. AMC was planning to purchase this engine to use in the Pacer.
But soon, the bubble popped. The executives and engineers who had a vested interest in the new motor and the unquestioning journalists who reported on it left out a few important details. It turns out that getting the rotars to seal was a crippling problem. The engines went through rotars faster than Donald Trump goes through wives. The seal leakages and and shape of the combustion chamber meant that they guzzled fuel and the incomplete combustion meant they belched out smog. With the world entering into the oil crisis and the upcoming 1975 EPA smog regulations, that was a problem. The rotary was a giant spinning turkey.
The fallout from this failure was immense. GM and Mercedes were both very profitable and could afford this mistake but not others. GM’s cancellation of the rotary engine left AMC with nothing to power their Pacer, they had to shoehorn in a giant 3.8 liter Inline 6, which made it heavy and slow. Citroen went bankrupt in 1974 and had to merge with Peugeot to survive. Mazda had to be saved by a loan from Sumitomo bank and accepted a partnership with Ford.
As for NSU, the company that started all this madness? Just as they were the first with the rotary, they were the first to be crippled by its problems. The 1965 Ro80 luxury sedan could’ve been a contender, with front wheel drive and an aerodynamic shape, it was eerily predictive of the family car of 1985. But the unreliable rotary engine destroyed its sales and in 1969, NSU had to be bought by Volkswagen. In 1972, it was merged with Auto Union to form Audi.
Mazda soldiered on with the rotary for several more decades (my dad drove an RX-7 during the 1980s). The last car to use it, the RX-8, was canned in 2012. Since then, Mazda, just like Lucy with her football, has hinted that it would bring back to rotary, much to the pleasure of wankel enthusiasts who cannot accept the facts that it is useless.
This whole incident provides a prescient case study. We are bombarded with articles that sound more like press releases claiming that [Insert technology name here] WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING. Usually, that “game changer” is full of fatal flaws and you will never hear about it again. Just think about all of the “Breakthrough” cancer treatments you’ve read about. How many have actually lived up to their billing?