Most of the internal combustion piston engines built for vehicles throughout history have pretty familiar core designs. The majority of fuel-burning vehicles sold today orient their pistons in inline ...

Long before Felix Wankel became synonymous with rotary engines, an inventive Hungarian-American engineer named Stephen M. Balzer secured one of the earliest patents for a rotary-powered automobile on ...

Part two of the Quest for Power series breaks down rotary and radial engines, why circular layouts solved cooling and reliability, and why they also came with nasty tradeoffs. From WWI rotaries to ...