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The last rotary-powered car from Mazda rolled off its production line in Japan on Friday, a 2011 Mazda RX-8 Spirit R sold only in the Japanese domestic market. With no successor confirmed, we may never see a rotary engine in a production car ever again, though those at Mazda certainly don’t want to see it this way. Part of the reason for its demise is its terrible fuel economy, which is around 40 percent worse than a conventional internal combustion engine with comparable performance. The engine, first launched in the 1967 Mazda Cosmo, did have its pluses, however. From the tidy...