rotarygod

The only snapped eccentric shafts I've ever seen were on some insanely high horsepower rotaries. If Able Ibarra can make 1000 hp from a 2 rotor and not snap one, that's pretty strong. No RX-7 ever had 3 rotors from the factory.

There is alot of misinformation about rotaries. Alot of the reliability issues popped up from the early rotaries such as the R100, R130, Cosmo, RX-2, etc. Back then seal technology wasn't what it is now. The first rotary powered cars were the NSU RO-80's which were unreliable. Apex seals used to be replaced all the time with them. The unreliability thing stuck as a result much in the same way as many people still think Harley Davidson motorcycles are unreliable. That too is a holdover from the '70s from when they were owned by bowling company AMF.

The rotary has come a long way since then. Power has more than doubled for the same sized engine, mileage has gone up (imagine that!), emissions have gone down, and reliability has gotten much better. Some people still can't let go of the past and ths sentiment gets passed on and on. Then you have the problem of the 3rd gen RX-7 people who have had many issues. That car admittedly did have it's shortcomings but the biggest flaw it had was many of it's owners. It is very hard to find an RX-7 of any generation where there wasn't some lousy mechanic working on it who had no idea what they were doing. The turbo rotaries were reliable as they came but many people would push them without proper tuning. This blows them up. Go check out the 7 forum sometime. You'll see a bunch of people rig up some cheap form of mod to get power and then blame the engine when it blows up. This happens all the time and much of the rotary community is to blame for the preception that the engine is weak. It is just fine with proper tuning. The issue is that most people don't properly tune them. Yes there will be some legitimate issues that arise but that's true with any engine. I would say the rotary is less tolerant of messing up than other engines but I wouldn't say it is less reliable.

Nonturbo rotaries hav been known to go to 250K miles or more if taken care of. So have piston engines. The key is how they are treated. You can take any engine out there, florr it everywhere you go and it's lifespan will decrease. If you could run your motor at full power nonstop, it would only last a couple of days before wearing out. That applies to any engine. Turbo rotaries have easily gone over 100K and I personally know of one that hit 200K. The turbo had to be rebuilt though but that wasn't an engine issue.

Yes there will always be those that say the rotary is unreliable. There will also always be those that don't tune them who blow them up and then continue to spread the unreliability rumors. There just isn't much way around this.

Nodoz

being that it's the april issue, it could just be an april fools joke. an RX without the R??? come on.

Old Rotor

I for one would love to see the Rotary in more models like the 70's. I had allmost all of them and the only thing they all had in common was the engine. So a new smaller lighter RX-?, would be welcome to me, it does not have to end in a 7.

zoom44

"after removing everythign that wotn make it to production"

exceot they left the headlights which absolutely arent production worthy and took away the red paint that was.

this car is going to be the next MX-3 and if they decide to do a Rotary variant (which they can with this chasis) it will be the RX-3. If Ford does a version of the Piston engine MX-3 it will probably be called Probe.
other discussion
https://www.rx8club.com/showthread.p...highlight=mx-3

also i mentioned this in another thread but the Kabura is being shown at otehr Shows around the world now. This is the only one of the 3 new concepts to be shown around outside its own back yard. I believe this to mean it has been greenlighted or is close to being so.