Now thar Hyundai has patented it, it will never become popular enough to impact the market and be standardized in more vehicles or change anything, similar to the Wankel engine.
Some people argue that intellectual property law is not free market capitalism, and is instead a regulation that benefits big business. I’m one of those people
While I’d agree in essence, in practice I don’t. They’re an offshoot of capitalism. The goal of capitalism is profit, and if you can create barriers to competition, that protects your profit. IP law is something created out of capitalism as a barrier. If it isn’t the government doing it, it’d be goons hired by those in power. They exist because of capitalism, not from something external to it. If the system were focused on doing good or creating utility, IP law wouldn’t be required.
Was the Wankel engine really a step forward though? I’m a gearhead who does all his own car maintenance, up to and including engine swaps in the past and retro-modding bigger turbos and aftermarket fuel injection systems into my cars (Datsuns in the latter case). That being said, I only know the very basics about rotary engines. I’ve always admired the Mazda RX’s from afar.
Mazda, who by no means makes a bad gasoline engine, could never get a rotary motor to last well or to have anywhere near decent fuel economy. Also, the rotary design was tried for a while in at least refrigeration compressor applications, where it blew up there a lot more than the other types of compressors as well.
Yea. They have worse efficiency. To get better efficiency from them you would need to run them hotter (afaik), and if you do that they would last even shorter.
It’s great if you want a smaller but still strong engine, but it’s not efficient and those seals are a big problem.
The argument is, though I’m not qualified to assess it, that Wankel engines are simpler, smaller, more power dense and, if allowed time to develop, would be an improvement on the traditional ICE. It’s very difficult to assess where we would have ended up and a little by the by, given we need to move away from burning fossil fuel.
That said, do check out LiquidPiston’s evolution of the Wankel engine. It does sort of look like they’ve solved a number of issues a traditional Wankel engine has.
Now thar Hyundai has patented it, it will never become popular enough to impact the market and be standardized in more vehicles or change anything, similar to the Wankel engine.
But capitalism creates innovation!!!
Some people argue that intellectual property law is not free market capitalism, and is instead a regulation that benefits big business. I’m one of those people
While I’d agree in essence, in practice I don’t. They’re an offshoot of capitalism. The goal of capitalism is profit, and if you can create barriers to competition, that protects your profit. IP law is something created out of capitalism as a barrier. If it isn’t the government doing it, it’d be goons hired by those in power. They exist because of capitalism, not from something external to it. If the system were focused on doing good or creating utility, IP law wouldn’t be required.
And regulations restrict both.
Was the Wankel engine really a step forward though? I’m a gearhead who does all his own car maintenance, up to and including engine swaps in the past and retro-modding bigger turbos and aftermarket fuel injection systems into my cars (Datsuns in the latter case). That being said, I only know the very basics about rotary engines. I’ve always admired the Mazda RX’s from afar.
Mazda, who by no means makes a bad gasoline engine, could never get a rotary motor to last well or to have anywhere near decent fuel economy. Also, the rotary design was tried for a while in at least refrigeration compressor applications, where it blew up there a lot more than the other types of compressors as well.
Yea. They have worse efficiency. To get better efficiency from them you would need to run them hotter (afaik), and if you do that they would last even shorter.
It’s great if you want a smaller but still strong engine, but it’s not efficient and those seals are a big problem.
The argument is, though I’m not qualified to assess it, that Wankel engines are simpler, smaller, more power dense and, if allowed time to develop, would be an improvement on the traditional ICE. It’s very difficult to assess where we would have ended up and a little by the by, given we need to move away from burning fossil fuel.
That said, do check out LiquidPiston’s evolution of the Wankel engine. It does sort of look like they’ve solved a number of issues a traditional Wankel engine has.
“Probably failed cuz they called it the wanker engine lmao. Now set aside another few milli for the copyright lawyers”