The Wankel engine fiasco and its parallel with the electric car

The Wankel engine was supposed to dominate the world: it only bankrupted NSU and Citroën

The Wankel rotary engine was the electric car of the 1960s. Compact, light, powerful, smooth, and with barely a few moving parts, the entire automotive industry blessed it as the future, and practically all brands licensed NSU and Wankel’s patents to avoid falling behind. It turned out to be the future of nothing. The fiasco took down NSU, absorbed by Volkswagen, and Citroën, bought by Peugeot. History repeats whenever someone compares the electric car to that wondrous engine that never quite worked.

What really peine to the Wankel engine?

The Wankel had three flaws that its defenders claimed were solved by investing in research. Premature wear of the three-lobed rotor tips. Consumption higher than any conventional engine. And pollution that no one knew how to clean up. None of the three was ever resolved.

It was not a budget issue. The oil crisis of 1973 arrived, and suddenly the cost of fuel mattered. The first pollution regulations from the United States arrived, and suddenly a dirty engine could not be sold, cheap or expensive. The Wankel did not fall due to lack of money: it fell because it hit a physical wall and a change of rules. The anecdote is amusing: according to forum users, Mazda still sells a model with a Wankel engine in Spain, starting at 38,050 euros. Half a century later, it remains a catalog rarity.

The parallels with the electric car

The same list of minor issues hangs over the electric vehicle as did back then. Charging time, supposedly to be shortened. Battery lifespan, supposedly to be extended. Range. Installing millions of charging points with millions of kilos of copper involved. Restructuring a power grid designed for something else. And the lithium bottleneck, a material that is already scarce and rising in price when electric cars are still only 1% of the global market.

Some argue that all this will be solved because pogre is unstoppable and spending enough is enough. The counterargument is uncomfortable and very unromantic: the periodic table is what it is. You cannot invent an element that stores energy better, nor stretch a battery’s capacity beyond what physics and chemistry allow. The fundamental difference with 1960, others point out, is that no one knew how the Wankel would end back then, whereas now the electric car is pushed with homework in sight.

How much does it cost to charge an electric car?

Here the numbers tighten. Figures cited by forum users place Tesla supercharger electricity at 0.32 euros per kWh and a Model S consumption at around 30 kWh per 100 kilometers on the highway, costing 9.6 euros per 100 km, and that calculates the shortest possible alucinación, because planning stops forces detours and adds kilometers. The car, meanwhile, hovers around 100,000 euros.

There are nuances, and they carry weight. New orders for the Model S and Model X include free lifetime supercharging, and the Model S announced in 2012 a range of 520 km, with batteries that, according to owners, remain at 90% after 250,000 km. It is important to note where these figures come from: from the brand and its drivers, not from an independent report. At the other end, a small, affordable model recharged at 3.3 kW—or 6.6 if you increase contracted power—more than covers home-to-work trips. The problem was never that usage, but expecting it to do everything.

Charging all the cars on one block: the math that doesn’t work

The big obstacle is not in the car, but on the sidewalk. According to the example used in the thread, a neighborhood transformer delivers up to 400 kVA and lives peacefully because households consume an average of 2,000 W. Now imagine all neighbors arrive home, plug in their cars, and their consumption jumps to 5,000 W. The transformer simply cannot handle it.

And that assumes everyone has a garage space with a plug, which is not the case for half of Spain. Multiplying charging points in a building requires recalculating the entire installation. Municipal electric buses and delivery vans are another thermometer: as long as most public services run on diesel, the message reaching the buyer is hard to disguise. Some electric municipal police units are already on the road, and precisely for that reason, they attract attention.

Will electricity become a rich person’s luxury?

The scenario drawn by the most pessimistic is not that electricity replaces combustion engines, but eliminates them for the majority. If gasoline engines are banned in cities without resolving all the above first, the result would be to expel the popular car from urban centers and leave the surface for those who can afford a Tesla or an electric Jaguar. The rest, to the suburbs. A Corsa for 30,000 euros—five million pesetas, the price at which a complete Mercedes was bought in the eighties—gives a measure of the leap.

The shrinking middle class would be left with an expensive, small model with battery replacement on installment, that I want and cannot have which in 1950s Spain was embodied by the Biscúter or the Vespa. With an added disadvantage: those who can, keep a second gasoline car in the garage for real trips.

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The comparison with the Wankel has a weak point that its defenders do not hide. If batteries make an unexpected leap in the coming years, the parallelism falls apart, and all this will have been a bad forum dream. If they do not, the sector is heading toward its own particular NSU, with the difference that this time no one can claim they were not warned.