Yesterday I went with a fellow rotary friend to the Houston Classy Chassis car show. There were some awesome cars there, impressively diverse from a 1940 Delahaye to an Enzo. The car you guys want to know about is the 1970 Mercedes-Benz C111. It is a naturally aspirated 4-rotor, mid engine concept car. I'll post some pics later. 350hp, 0-60 in 4.8 seconds and 187mph top end. That's crazy for 1970!

http://www.conceptcarz.com/vehicle/z...1/default.aspx

http://www.classychassis.org/

 

Great find and many thanks for the link that has all the photos and info.

 

every major manufacturer wanted a piece of the rotary... the 70's vette was first prototyped with a 4 rotor. suzuki built a single rotor motorcycle the RE-5, some diesel company tried to build a diesel rotary using one 4rotor as the engine itself with a 2 or 3 rotor as the "compressor"/"superchager", and even ford tried to develop the rotary but they could never figure out the "high oil consumption" problem(or so i've heard)... and someone figured out the most important piece of the puzzle: the apex seal.... someone looked at the apex of the trochoid and stuck a pencil lead in there and it somehow solved the many problems they had with the compression, oiling and etc... it went something like that... thus in the spanish speaking world the apex seals are also called "carbones" cause some seals are made from carbon-ceramic

 

Wow, I wouldn't mind getting one of those. Looks dangerous, but with the 4 rotor, looks deadly.

 

Mercedes developed the C111 as prototypes for their Wankel-engine program. They had three and four rotor engines. When the program ended due to the oilcrisis, the converted the program to diesel cars. Some more info on these (and all other things rotary) are to be found here (in German, but still great page): www.der-wankelmotor.de
I keep posting this link... Seems many people are intrested in the "other" rotary engines (non-mazda) but not many know much about them.
BTW: Rolls Royce had a diesel rotary, and Wankelsupertec in Germany is developing a new rotary multifuel engine. I'm not really sure how serious they are though. Haven't seen much progress on their engines lately. According to their own sayings, their modular system is quite powerfull yet not more thirsty then a modern TDI (diesel) engine. They run it on diesel btw, but need a sparkplug to ignite.

 

i assume is going to be 5 to 10 years down the road if mercedes is going to produce a 4 rotor concept?

 

They did produce a 4 rotor concept, 1n 1969. The photos and specs are in the first post.

 

sorry for the confusion, what i'm trying to say is that Wankelsupertec is going to develop the rotary multifuel engine is 5 to 10 years time.