Mazda has become the latest car company to weigh in on the electric car era and like its Japanese counterpart Toyota, the company is taking a multi-pronged approach that should see around 25 percent of the cars it sells being electric-only by 2030, ahead of its ultimate goal of achieving climate neutrality by 2050.
This plan will be underpinned by a large-scale roll-out of hybrid and electric vehicles in the next decade, which will be built around two new platforms that the company announced this week.
First in line, and something of a transitionary platform, is the ‘Skyactiv Multi-Solution Scalable Architecture’, which will underpin three purely electric vehicles as well as five plug-in hybrids and five regular hybrid models between 2022 and 2025. Mazda will also be introducing a more dedicated electric car platform called the ‘Skyactiv Scalable EV Architecture’ and this will spawn several EV products from 2025 onwards.
The Multi-Solution Scalable Architecture will form the basis of small cars with transverse engines as well as future premium products with longitudinal arrangements. The replacements for the Mazda CX-5 and Mazda6 are expected to adopt the latter format, complete with brand new straight-six engines, which you can expect to be hybridised to some extent.
Mazda also announced that it would be teaming up with five Japanese companies to jointly develop standardised engineering specifications for next-generation in-vehicle communications systems. Also under development is a new autonomous driving system called Mazda Co-Pilot. The system monitors the driver’s physical condition at all times and if a sudden change is detected, the system brings the car to a stop in a place that’s deemed safe and automatically calls emergency services.`