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Just a guess, but I'm guessing the displacement increase to 1.6L in the 16X was to decrease the surface area/volume ratio. They also modified the geometry to improve combustion chamber surface area/volume ratio, and increase compression ratio (to a modest 10:1 or something). However the combustion chamber still has a huge surface area compared to a piston engine, which doesn't bode well for low rpm efficiency, but they'll need to try to run it at lower rpm to get acceptable fuel economy due to the high displacement.
Their fuel efficiency in the Renesis was something like 30% worse than a comparable piston engine, peak BSFC falls short something like 10-20% or so, and at max power we can see that the combustion efficiency is still bad enough to cause over 25% efficiency loss compared to a piston engine, so if they can close the gap to 10% under normal driving circumstances that would be nothing short of a miracle.
Good luck to them. The rotary is way too cool to just throw away IMO.
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