Hello Alpinisti:
There were actually three Wankel-powered motorcycles built. The first was
the Hercules W 2000 in 1972 which was built with a Sachs snowmobile engine.
Hercules at the time had acquired rights through its relationship with
Zweirad Union a consortium established in the sixties which included DKW,
Victoria and Express. This consortium had been spun-off by Auto-Union
which of course became Audi. Audi subsequently acquired NSU after its
failure over the RO 80 and was in turn swallowed by VW. Interestingly, the
Hercules was sold as a DKW in England and other markets.
The second Wankel-engined bike was built by Suzuki - the RE5 - for a short
time in the seventies. It was an enormously complex engineering
tour-de-force. Both it and the Hercules were commercial failures.
The third machine was built by Norton for a number of years in England
during the eighties. It was much more successful but with the failure of
Norton is no longer in production. There are currently no Wankel-engined
bikes or cars in production.
Incidentally, the first production Wankel-engined vehicle was the NSU Sport
Prinz Roadster with single rotor engine. It was introduced in 1964 as the
NSU Spider.
John McEwen
> My heavens, NO! There were a series of NSU RO cars in the '60's. NSU was
> merged into Audi which was then purchased by VW, so Volkswagen owns the
> rights to the Wankel engine. Every time Mazda sells one, they send a
> ten-spot or so to Wolfsburg.
I remember seeing a Wankel-powered motorcycle once in the 1970s. I
think it was an NSU. Very unusual looking!
-- T.J. Higgins tjhiggin(at)ingr.com Huntsville, AL
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Tue Sep 05 2000 - 09:34:35 CDT