How Mazda Plans To Save The Petrol Engine

Car makers may be falling over themselves in the rush to electrification, but for its advanced Skyactiv-X engine series, due to debut in the next 3 model in 2019, Mazda has other ideas

- Antony Ingram

MAZDA MUST SPEND ITS MONEY wisely. With a global output of around 1.6million vehicles per year, it’s a long way down the automotive pecking order, and its independence means it lacks the economies of scale present in companies such as the Volkswagen Group, Toyota, Hyundai and Kia, or General Motors.

Yet this independence also gives Mazda relatively free rein to forge its own development path. No other company persisted with Wankel rotary engines for as long as Hiroshima’s engineers (not necessarily a wise investment, but one indicative of Mazda’s focus on finding engineering solutions to problems), and as the rest of the industry turned to turbocharging and downsizing to reduce its environmental impact, Mazda implemented what it calls ‘rightsizing’: refining conventional combustion engines with improved technology and making them appropriately sized for their application.

The company’s upcoming combustion engine series, dubbed Skyactiv-X, takes the concept of constant technological refinement to its next logical stage and introduces a technology several companies have tried, and failed, to implement in the past with petrol engines: compression ignition.

The idea in itself is nothing new. Diesel engines already operate on the principle of compression ignition and several companies have experimented with it in petrol cars at the prototype stage. Infiniti’s recently introduced variable-compression engine, while not running on compression ignition as yet, features technology that could make it possible with petrol vehicles in the future. But Mazda has found a way to do it today, and with much less complication than previous experiments with the technology.