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Comment by John Mellor

MAZDA Motor Corporation is on the verge of introducing an engine design that could transform the finances of the company into the next decade, give it a welcome increase in share and remake the nature of diesel-dependent markets such as Europe.

The Japanese car-maker has revealed it is ready to go into production with what is, in effect, a petrol-powered version of a diesel engine.

The announcement comes just as the world’s governments and global media are taking a stick to diesel engines which, for example, have traditionally made up more than half of the 16 million sales of cars in Europe.

In the wake of the Volkswagen diesel scandal, in which it transpires that meeting existing diesel engine emissions standards have been such a struggle that many car-makers have resorted to dirty tricks and gamed the rules, diesel sales in Europe are on the nose.

The car-buying public in Europe is reacting. Diesel sales in the first half of 2017 fell from more than half the market to 46 per cent of the market. That is a loss of about 150,000 sales for diesel cars in just six months and the gap was filled by a corresponding increase in sales of petrol-powered cars.

The last time petrol cars outsold diesel cars in Europe was in 2009.

Mazda3 Diesel engine

In absolute numbers, 152,000 fewer diesel cars were sold. This drop was offset by an increase in the sale of petrol cars which translates into a projected increase in petrol car sales of around 330,000 units a year on current trends.

And there appears to be worse to come with August figures showing diesel sales at just 42 per cent of the European market.

This trends against diesel presents two problems.

First: A swing of more than 330,000 in engine supply (and very probably now something like 500,000 engines) is very significant and it is potentially only just the beginning. In other words, car-makers in Europe have to quickly find capacity to make more petrol engines and have to take a massive loss of demand for diesel engines into account in their production schedules.

Second: While diesel engines are, in many ways, worse polluters than petrol engines, they do have the advantage over petrol engines of emitting much less CO2. The industry has already voiced concerns that, if the market swing continues, then car-makers selling ever more petrol cars than diesel cars will struggle to balance their CO2 requirements.

Some are pointing to EVs as a potential solution but EV sales in most markets are proving to be hard to find on a scale that can make a difference.

And along comes Mazda, once more at the forefront as a pioneer of internal combustion engine designs.

Mazda3 SkyActiv-X prototype

Mazda, it will be remembered, was the one car-maker which doggedly pursued the rotary piston engine from the 1970s until 2012 and still has plans for its reintroduction as a primary power source and potentially as a range-extending engine in an EV.

It was also Mazda that went into production with a Miller-cycle 2.5 litre V6 engine (sold in Australia in the Eunos 800 in the 1990s). This engine used 40 per cent less fuel than its conventional equivalent (6 l/100km Vs 10 l/100km) yet it produced more power and torque.

So Mazda has form when is comes to getting behind innovations in engines. Although it must be said it has been awfully lonely out there in that no other car-makers have taken Mazda on with such innovations and even Mazda has shelved the innovations from production for the time being.

But the company’s revelation in August, and at a more detailed briefing last month, that it will launch in 2019 a world-first mass-produced compression-ignition petrol engine is proof that the desire to gain a competitive advantage through engine design has never left the R&D department in Hiroshima.

The engine is called the SkyActiv-X and the technology is called Spark Controlled Compression Ignition and Mazda says that it will be at least as fuel-efficient as a diesel engine.

Like a diesel, in the SkyActiv-X engine the petrol fuel-air mixture – much leaner than equivalent petrol engines – ignites when compressed by the piston. It is this compression-ignition technology that makes diesel engines so much more economical than equivalent petrol engines and produce such prodigious amounts of torque.

RX-8, the most recent rotary but maybe not the last

Fitted with compression ignition and a supercharger, the SkyActiv-X engine boosts fuel economy and can lift torque output by up to 30 per cent compared with current-generation SkyActiv-G petrol units.

At its best, this would translate into an increase of torque in a 2.0-litre Mazda3 petrol engine from 200Nm to 260Nm. The Mazda 1.5-litre diesel engine as fitted to the CX-3 develops 270Nm of torque.

And that brings us back to Europe where diesels are on the nose and Mazda has developed an engine that has all the attributes of a diesel but it runs on petrol.

That could prove to be a considerable competitive advantage against some very high-volume players in the European market which are deisel-dependent and give Mazda some leverage to increase sales and pick up share with this new engine in a very timely way.

And just to give you an idea of the potential volumes that are at stake here, in March this year Europeans bought an all-time record of nearly two million cars – in just one month.

Eunos Cosmo

Indeed, Mazda may well find itself on the receiving end of approaches from other car-makers wanting to buy SkyActiv-X engines from the Hiroshima-based company or buy licences to use the Mazda SkyActiv-X technology in their cars.

There is a lot to be said about getting your competitors to sell your products for you.

Years ago, a new man at the helm of IBM found the company was spending a fortune on patents to defend unique designs that IBM fielded within the computer market. He questioned the cost-benefit and ordered that the technology be licenced to IBM’s competitors. Every time the competitors made a sale IBM clipped the ticket while the brand maintained its market share.

This could interest Mazda because the company may only have 10 to 12 years to sell petrol engines in some of these markets since some governments recently announced they would ban the sales of petrol and diesel cars from 2030.

And other car-makers might be shy of spending on their own version of the SkyActiv-X engine when faced with such a severe disruption projected for 2030.
So the timing for MMC appears just right.

Comment by John Mellor

Mazda Rotary engine

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