The dream of Saarland as the centre of Wankel engine construction in Europe

In 1967, the car manufacturers NSU and Citroën founded the COMOTOR company in Luxembourg. In Altforweiler, Saarland, they set up a works to produce Wankel engines. It was officially opened on 14 June 1973.

In the 1960s, the international car industry believed in the engine that was named after its inventor Felix Wankel (1902-1988). It went into series production for the first time in the NSU Spider, in 1964. The media celebrated the Wankel engine and way it ran, like a turbine. It was small and light – the press referred to it as 'pocket-sized'. Almost the whole of the car industry invested their hopes in it: Alfa Romeo, Fichtel & Sachs, Ford, General Motors, Rolls Royce, MAN, Klöckner-Humboldt-Deutz, Toyota, Nissan, Mazda and many others.

Saarland was to become the centre of Wankel engine construction in Europe. There were to be 5,000 jobs. The plan was for Altforweiler to make 5,000 engines daily and supply other manufacturers as well as NSU and Citroën.

However, when the works opened in 1973 the Wankel engine was already in reverse gear. Engine damage in the NSU RO 80 and the oil crisis gave it a bad name because its petrol consumption was considerably higher than that of other types of engine. Peugeot took over Citroën in 1975 and liquidated the Wankel. COMOTOR closed down. Audi, the owner of NSU, stopped making the RO 80 in 1977. Mazda alone has refused to abandon the Wankel engine to this day, instead optimising its exhaust values and its fuel consumption.