Comotor SA was a joint venture between NSU and

Citroën Citroën ()The double-dot diacritic over the 'e' is a diaeresis () indicating the two vowels are sounded separately, and not as a diphthong. is a French automobile brand. The "Automobiles Citroën" manufacturing company was founded on 4 June 19 ...

, created in

Luxembourg Luxembourg, officially the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, is a landlocked country in Western Europe. It is bordered by Belgium to the west and north, Germany to the east, and France on the south. Its capital and most populous city, Luxembour ...

in April 1967. Its goal was to produce

Wankel engine The Wankel engine (, ) is a type of internal combustion engine using an eccentric (mechanism), eccentric Pistonless rotary engine, rotary design to convert pressure into rotating motion. The concept was proven by German engineer Felix Wankel, f ...

s. It followed an earlier, 1964 joint venture of both companies, the Geneva-based Comobil subsidiary, focusing on the development of the engines. Comotor engines were used by the Citroën M35 and by the GS Birotor. In 1969 the company purchased a large 850 000 m² plot of land at Altforweiler, half an hour to the east of Luxembourg in

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in order to build a factory. The venture was hamstrung by technical, reliability, and fuel consumption issues. Although Citroën took a slow and calculated development path, including a two-year

beta test The software release life cycle is the process of developing, testing, and distributing a software product (e.g., an operating system). It typically consists of several stages, such as pre-alpha, alpha, beta, and release candidate, before the fi ...

program in which 267 Citroën M35 prototypes were tested exhaustively by selected customers, rising fuel prices in 1973 nullified market demand for the fuel-thirsty engine. The vast sums that were invested in the Comobil and Comotor joint ventures were major contributors to the bankruptcy of both NSU and

. Henk van Veen of the Netherlands designed the OCR 1000 motorcycle around the Comotor engine. His company manufactured 38 of these motorcycles between 1974 and 1978.

References

Engineering companies of Luxembourg Defunct companies of Luxembourg Wankel engines NSU Motorenwerke Citroën {{motorvehicle-company-stub