The Wankel Challenge

In their increasingly successful invasion of the U.S. auto market, Japanese automakers have so far relied on low production costs and prices to win American customers. Now Hiroshima-based Toyo Kogyo Co. Ltd., Japan's fourth largest car manufacturer, is challenging Detroit with fresh technology. In Washington, Florida and Texas, the company has quietly begun selling two compact models equipped with German-designed Wankel engines, which generate twice as much horsepower per pound of weight as conventional piston engines. In California, where Toyo Kogyo will introduce its Mazdas next month, auto dealers have sized up the car as such a hot prospect that 527 have applied for 75 franchises.

Because of its basic simplicity, the Wankel engine has long been considered a strong contender to supplant piston engines in mass-produced autos. Invented in 1954 by a mechanical wizard named Felix Wankel, the engine replaces conventional cylinders and pistons with a triangular rotor that revolves in a combustion chamber shaped like a fat figure eight. The spinning rotor not only controls the intake of gasoline and exhaust of burned gases, but turns the shaft that drives the wheels of the car. Thus Wankel engines have far fewer moving parts than piston engines. Moreover, they lack valves, rods, lifters, a camshaft and a crankshaft--elements that cause noise and vibration in piston engines.

Like a Jack Rabbit. Technical difficulties slowed acceptance of the Wankel. Toyo Kogyo paid West Germany's Audi NSU $12 million in the early '60s for rights to the engine, spent seven years and $20 million improving its performance. The most crucial problem, devising a tight but long-lasting seal at the three apexes of the rotor, was solved by substituting a carbon alloy for the cast-iron tip used in German models. The original Wankel engines belched clouds of smoke, so Toyo Kogyo built a 40-lb. "thermal-reactor" afterburner to oxidize the exhaust and attached a dozen more antipollution devices to the engine. As a result, says Jiro Morikawa. president of Mazda Motors of America, the Japanese Wankel can be easily modified to meet the U.S.'s strict 1975 standards for auto pollution, even if conventional European and U.S. piston engines cannot.

Toyo Kogyo started commercial production of Wankel-powered autos in 1967, and last year turned out 66,000 of them--more than twice as many as Audi NSU has built since the engine was invented. Only 1,360 rotary-engined Mazdas have been sold in the U.S. so far, but the company expects to snare 10,000 U.S. customers this year. Though the interiors seem cramped, the Mazdas are not cheap: $2,495 for the R-100 and $2,800 for the larger, more powerful RX-2. Their appeal lies in jackrabbit speed and smooth riding. The Mazda can accelerate from zero to 60 m.p.h. in 13 sec., and the faster the car is driven, at least up to 100 m.p.h., the quieter it sounds to passengers.

Jockeying for Position. Obviously impressed by recent strides in Wankel performance, General Motors last year agreed to pay $50 million over five years for the right to use the German engine. Auto experts figure that G.M. will probably aim at producing a Wankel-powered compact, perhaps smaller than today's Vega, within three or four years. Taking a different approach, Ford is dickering to buy a 20% share of Toyo Kogyo, partly because the No. 2 U.S. automaker is interested in the Wankel engine and partly because the company wants a share of the domestic Japanese car market. How fast Wankel autos will catch on in the U.S. remains to be seen, but all the jockeying for position certainly increases the possibility that the German engine will bring a major change in auto power systems during the '70s.

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