Mazda Revives Rotary Engine For Toyota’s Self-driving Fleet

By John LippertBloomberg

Mazda Motor Corp. stopped selling rotary engines in 2012 after spending nearly half a century trying to perfect them. The company is reviving the classic technology in what seems like an unlikely place: battery-powered, self-driving vehicles it’s developing with Toyota Motor Corp. to deliver everything from pizza to people.

Mazda will provide rotary engines to run generators that recharge the batteries for Toyota’s in-development driverless delivery fleet, Masahiro Moro, president of Mazda’s North American operations, said in an interview.

“This is a very suitable engine to run a generator because it’s compact and lightweight, with no noise or vibration, and it has very good fuel economy,’’ said Moro, speaking on the sidelines of the North American International Auto Show in Detroit.Rotary engines need just a handful of parts to orchestrate the burning of fuel and removal of exhaust inside a single combustion chamber, while traditional engines use an array of pistons, valves and crankshafts to coordinate these tasks in multiple chambers. But after decades of trying, Mazda couldn’t lower emissions from its rotary-engine sports cars enough to satisfy regulators, so it stopped selling them.

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