Through the history of internal combustion engines, there has been plenty of evolution, but few revolutions. Talk of radically different designs always leads to a single name – Wankel.

Mazda is notorious for putting rotary engines under the hood of its cars, but here are six models from other manufacturers you might not know about.

Wankel engines first saw use in production cars as early as 1964 — and not even in a Mazda, but rather in an NSU. That little single-rotor powerplant quickly evolved into the more typical two ...

The Mazda Miata is beloved for being tiny and light, a combination of qualities most modern automakers seem to avoid like the ...

Although there was briefly a company called Rotary Rocket, the term is much better known as a nickname for the Mazda RX-7 — one of the few cars that used a Wankel, or rotary, engine. If you ever ...

The issue, as it has pretty much always been, is environmental. While the Wankel rotary engine does indeed make a lot of power in a small, lightweight package, it does so while burning lots of ...

Mazda's Wankel rotary engine has always been unique in the automotive landscape as a mass-produced internal combustion engine that eschews such unsightly items as pistons, valves and camshafts.

The only cars in recent times to utilise a Wankel rotary engine have been Mazdas – the RX-8 being the most recent. But the revolutionary engine has made an appearance in plenty of other vehicles ...