West Germany: The Wankel Wager

The German carmaker NSU Motorenwerke last week displayed an ultra-utilitarian sedan that will, it hopes, sire a new generation of automobiles. Called RO 80, the new car has a strange engine under the hood, one that increasingly intrigues the automotive industry.

A mechanical wizard named Felix Wankel invented it in 1954, but it took NSU 13 years of tinkering to bring the “Wankel engine” to its present stage. It is a non-piston gas engine consisting of a three-cornered rotor that swirls in a combustion chamber shaped like a fat-waisted figure eight. Doing away with the stop-and-start movements of the piston engine saves valuable power for a continuous circular movement. The RO 80 will feature two half-liter engines, placed side by side, yet even this will only take up half as much space as a conventional motor of equal power and weigh about two-thirds as much.

An early version of the Wankel, used in the NSU Spider sports car since 1964, proved sufficiently promising for NSU to go ahead with the venture and commit virtually all its resources to it. Meanwhile, 17 firms, including Curtiss-Wright Corp. and Outboard Marine Corp. in the U.S., Rolls-Royce in England and Alfa Romeo in Italy have paid NSU for licenses for the new engine. Citroen of France set up a joint corporation with the small German carmaker to produce a Wankel-powered auto by the beginning of 1969.

“Status Car.” For all that interest, NSU’s bosses—Director Gerd Stieler von Heydekampf and Deputy Board Chairman Viktor Frankenberger—are counting heavily on their own RO 80, a homely four-door sedan with sloping front and raised rear that looks more like the product of wind tunnels than of style-minded designers. Later this month, RO 80s will start rolling off the assembly line at NSU’s Neckarsulm plant near Stuttgart at the rate of 50 a day. They will be priced at $3,537, just below the prestigious Mercedes 250 S model. “The German mentality demands that a status car carry a high price—if not, it loses much of its prestige,” says Von Heydekampf.

So far, in nine years of postwar carmaking, Von Heydekampf has concentrated on the other end of the scale.

His model T.T., the Spider and the Prinz 4, a little bug below Volkswagen price and power level, have a mere 3.2% share of the domestic market and 6.4% of German exports. In the first seven months of 1967, NSU car sales dropped 27% from the same period last year. Volkswagen too was feeling the pinch: in July both Opel (G.M.) and Taunus (Ford) outsold the Beetle in Germany. That NSU has survived the crush of the giants at all is a triumph. Its sales grew from $10 million in 1958 to $120 million last year, and almost all profits were poured back into the company. Now, says Von Heydekampf, “If the RO 80 sinks, we sink with it.”