Your useless trivia for the day.......
Yes they did. Two models actually - first a single rotor Wankel engine mounted longitudinally in an Ami-type car. And then - a 2 rotor Wankel mounted in a GS series - yup called a GS Birotor. Although all the GS series cars had a longitudinal flat 4 - like a 2wd Subaru - which should have easily allowed room for a Wankel engine placement like the Ro80 above.......noooo.....they completely re-configured everything to a transverse layout. Which meant even an all-new tranny ( semi-automatic to boot ). The development costs must have been huge.....
I guess Citroen must have considered it the way of the future. But alas....it didn't turn out that way......if 15 mpg fuel economy wasn't bad enough...reliability was horrible. Same type of housing plating and apex seals soon surfaced. Warranty costs were huge and Citroen pulled the plug after just under 1000 of them were sold. Citroen attempted to buy them all back and crush them to save face. For those few who refused to sell them back....so the story goes...Citroen yanked the type approval ( which made them almost impossible to register for the road ) and refused to sell ANY spare parts.......thus very few survive today....
Meanwhile......up north in Russia.......Lada were working away on their own Wankel engine program. In some ways it seemed ideal. Being Russians...they likely didn't bother with those pesky licensing and patent fees due to Dr. Wankel. And unlike a turbo or high performance piston engine...a Wankel would run happily on the poor quality low octane Russian gasoline.
They first produced a single rotor Wankel engine for the RWD 124 sedan copy they were making. But not much quicker than the existing piston engined version. So then...they produced a 2 rotor version with about 110-120 hp or so. They made a bunch of those...mostly for the KGB as ideal chase vehicles !! But if you were well enough connected.....you could be the king of the Russian roads in what looked like a normal Lada sedan.....Engine life was said to be also quite poor....
By the later 80's, Lada finally transitioned to a modern front wheel drive hatchback, known mostly as the Samara. VW Golf sized. Said to be mostly a clean sheet Russian design - no involvement from Fiat this time - but it is said that Porsche had a hand in the design. A rather conventional front wheel drive hatch with SOHC piston engines of 1100 to 1500 cc.
But.......little known is they also DID produce a Samara variant with a two rotor Wankel engine. Yes, still front wheel drive with a transverse engine driving a 5 speed tranny. Quite light and with 140 hp it would just smoke the fastest Golf GTI of the era........
Now that folks would perhaps be a great donor drivetrain for swapping into an X1/9. Wankels are quite light and compact. Smooth and rev to the moon. Still likely some Fiat DNA in there, as Samaras still had a 4 on 98mm bolt pattern for example....
to my knowledge, Mazda never made a transverse engined Wankel....but I could be wrong. But above is at least two transversed engined Wankels. Let us know if there are any more......
