Mazda was building cars with Rotary Engines too in the 70s and was a total failure.Mazda nearly went broke.
It was NSU that failed. However, the NSU name can still be found on the Mazda engines as NSU still owns the rights to the design, even though Mazda did all the hard work and solved all the problems.
It was the R&D that nearly sent Mazda broke.
All Wankel engine manufacturers are licensed to NSU, this includes Mazda, Suzuki, Aixro(competition carting engine) and even Graupner/O.S.
Mazda started producing the engines commercially in the 60's and they were still in production up until the RX8 was discontinued in 2011. That is almost half a century of continuous production.
The Cosmo was Mazda's first production vehicle to have a Wankel and was released in 1967.
The amount of misinformation and misunderstandings about the Wankel engines staggers belief and more often than not seems to be "a friend of a friend had a 2nd cousin who's wife's uncle drove one once and said blah blah blah blah"
Many of my friends, myself included, are rotary nuts. I have seen and driven many Mazda's that have done hundreds of thousands of kilometers and they still run fine, a bit tired maybe but so are 'conventional' engines at that age.
One of my friends has a street-legal RX3 drag car that does high 8's and he drives it to work.
Autoblog.com said:
On November 16, 2011, Mazda CEO, Takashi Yamanouchi, announced that the company is still committed to producing the rotary engine, saying, "So long as I remain involved with this company... there will be a rotary engine offering or multiple offerings in the lineup."
