On May 30, 1967, the two-rotor Cosmo Sport hit showrooms; an improved version followed a year later. Within a decade, Mazda's sales grew tenfold, from 41,000 vehicles to 400,000. Its employee headcount ballooned from under 4,500 to over 21,000. The company sold more than one million RX-7 and RX-8 sports cars between 1978 and 2012.
The rotary engine is a fundamental part of Mazda's history. You can't sneak off to the bathroom at its Hiroshima plant without someone reminding you the rotary is a part of their DNA. Even locals have been indoctrinated; a guide at the train station said, "Aaah, rotary!" when I mentioned where I was going.
Because of this history, Mazda is placing its bets—and its future—on those Dorito-shaped rotors. But just because the rotary engine saved Mazda in the 20th century, will it have any chance to do so in this 21st? Mazda sure seems to think so.
The Problem
The last RX-8 rolled off the assembly line in 2012, its rotary engine forced into retirement by evermore-stringent global environmental regulations. (The company had long since embraced conventional engines in every other model, a process that started in the 1980s.) The advantages of rotaries are offset out by two big problems. A large combustion chamber means the engines burn a lot of fuel and produce a lot of CO2 emissions. The engines also produce relatively low torque, and aren't known for great reliability. Torque and reliability are not insurmountable issues, but efficiency was another issue. The RX-8 delivered a paltry 19 mpg combined. Mazda tried mightily to fix the problem, but despite considerable investment the a 1.6-liter direct-injected engine shown in the 2007 Taiki concept never saw production. It couldn't meet emissions expectations.
The automaker has money to spend on R&D—it notched a record profit of $1.41 billion in FY 2014. But it's a small company and doesn't have the luxury of funding a project that may not pay off. Trying to make the rotary work, instead of directing resources to improve its already excellent and fuel-efficient SkyActiv four-cylinder engines, could bury the company in its own history.
So the million-dollar question comes to the surface: how important is it for Mazda to develop a rotary powerplant? Is it really that imperative to the fundamental existence of the automaker?
“The fact is if you’re just looking at the numbers financially, then this investment we’re talking about is maybe not a correct investment,” says Mazda managing executive officer Kiyoshi Fujiwara.1 “However, there are two reasons that we still need to make an investment in this: the first reason is because we want to take really good care of our customers and fans, and another is for the satisfaction of our employees. For the morale of the colleagues we work together with here."
The Hydrogen Solution
There is a path that makes more sense, one that neatly sidesteps the rotary's key weaknesses: hydrogen.
In the auto industry, hydrogen typically is shorthand for fuel cells, which combine the element with oxygen to generate electricity without carbon emissions. But there's another way to put the universe's most abundant element to use: With relatively few modifications, you can make a rotary engine run on hydrogen. The drop in performance is almost imperceptible, and you get no carbon emissions.
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