Given the simplicity of its construction and function, highHP/weight ,and
high HP/volume, why has the market not seized the technology as a
competitive advantage/improvement over the piston engine, in your opinion ?
I don't understand it. And this is just Mazda's rotary. There ought to be
hundreds of rotaries out there, of varying displacements, compression
ratios, turbo's, rotor number etc.
BTW,,,I don't believe in conspiracies. There must be a reason,,, no.

Bill

Several reasons I suspect. 

A: Bad gas mileage on early examples.

B: The smog wars. Mazda had a hard time keeping up 
on the smog front. 

C: No low RPM torque. A rotary makes a better aircraft engine than
it does a car engine.

D: Early problems with sealing the combustion chamber due
to inadvertent overheating by the driver. Melted rubber O-rings.

E: Mazda made a big mistake on pricing the 93 RX7. 
Too expensive and too many initial problems that had nothing 
to do with the rotary per se.

D: Many companies tried to build a rotary but failed. Only
Mazda hung in there.

F: Discriminations by the car racing organizations. They handicapped
the rotary to make it equal performance with all other cars. They are not
into furthering car/engine technology. They are into the circus aspects
of car racing and having one make of car dominate racing is not their 
idea of fun. For example Lynn is forced to run a 12A in his 
3rd gen body. The rotary racers responded with spec
racing where only rotaries race against other rotaries.
If you put a minimum weight requirement on a race car
you handicap high power to weight ratio engines.

G: A galaxy sized manufacturing infrastructure for the piston engine 
would have to be scrapped. This is also related to F: above. 

Paul Lamar
 
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