Grand Design: NSU Wankel Spider
A brave toe in the water: the first ‘rotary’ car sold to the general public
A peek inside this revolutionary rotary ‘toe in the water’.
The development of the Wankel engine was a prolonged and complex saga. The impression left with the uninformed is of barelyunderstood technical issues, unsurprising failure and a comical name. The true story is one of huge international effort and investment in a promising new technology.
The engine challenged materials science, machine tooling and corporate budgets, then came good just in time to be torpedoed by fuel crises and emissions regulation. The NSU Spider was an early chapter: the
first ‘rotary’ car offered to the public. NSU was the German firm at which the technology was first developed. It was under pressure to present the fruits of its work, particularly from licensees such as Mazda, who were also nearly productionready and held back as NSU reserved the cachet of being first to the market.
Against this background, the Spider was unsurprisingly a work-in-progress at launch. Lacking a second rotor and the torque convertor that would arrive with the Ro80, it had to be driven in a very spirited manner to extract its performance and to avoid low-rpm roughness, early deterioration and failure. Brave customers weren’t compensated for their guinea pig role, either: the Spider cost twice as much as a Triumph Spitfire. Driven and maintained competantly by an engineer, however, the pretty and agile little sportster could give very good service.