The Mazda Motor Corporation has announced that it will accelerate its global electrification plans as it heads towards a carbon-neutral future by 2050. The Japanese vehicle maker says that a quarter of its products will be fully electric and all other models will be electrified in some form by 2030.
Between 2022 and 2025, the Japanese carmaker will introduce a range of new products using its ‘SKYACTIV Multi-Solution Scalable Architecture’. This will be mainly for markets in Japan, Europe, the US, China and the 10 member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). This will include five hybrid models five plug-in hybrid models and three all-electric models.
Mazda is also developing a dedicated platform for electric vehicles (EVs) called SKYACTIV EV Scalable Architecture. This will be used for electric vehicles with various sizes and body types on products that will be launched between 2025 and 2030.
Mazda is committing to reducing CO2 emissions from every car and believes that all options available must be used to achieve climate neutrality. Continued electrification will go hand in hand with the development of advanced internal combustion engine technology.
Mazda is also investing in different projects and partnerships to promote the development and use of renewable fuels in cars. In Japan, it’s involved in several joint research projects and studies as part of an ongoing industry-academia-government collaboration to promote the widespread adoption of biofuels from microalgae growth. In Europe, Mazda joined the eFuel Alliance in February 2021 as the first original equipment manufacture (OEM).
Currently, Mazda only has one electric vehicle in its range, the MX-30, which is a compact electric sports utility vehicle (SUV) with a range of 124 miles (200km). It’s good news to see them bringing more zero-emission models, although it seems a little odd that so much investment is going into ICE vehicles when so many countries will be banning their sales in 2030, and some, like Norway, as soon as 2025.
