Mazda announces the return of rotors next year, but this time it's no longer the engine

At Le Mans, France in June 1991, a green and orange Mazda 787B race car crossed the finish line with a two-lap advantage over the second-placed Mercedes-Benz C11 race car after 24 hours of fierce battle. .

This moment may be the most glorious moment in Mazda's history. It is also the best proof of Mazda's dedicated research on rotary engines since the 1960s.

But unfortunately, the brilliance of Mazda and the rotary engine was forever stuck on that day.

With the adjustment of the Le Mans regulations the following year, the rotary engine was forced to withdraw from the stage of Le Mans. Although in the more practical civilian car market, Mazda took out a new generation of RX-7 code-named FD (Takahashi Keisuke's car), which made the rotary engine and Mazda popular among fans around the world.

However, in the following 20 years, the disadvantages of high fuel consumption, low durability and difficult maintenance of the rotary engine have been magnified. Finally, with the official discontinuation of Mazda RX-8, the rotary engine officially faded out of our sight.

This is actually in line with the natural law of survival, just as today's internal combustion engines are about to be replaced by electric motors.

Although rotary engines have the advantages of small size, light weight, simple structure, high speed, and high power, these so-called advantages are only applicable to racing cars or niche performance cars.

For daily use of civilian vehicles, the fuel consumption of 20L per 100 kilometers is unacceptable to ordinary people. So from a practical point of view, the rotary engine may be a backward technology.