Mazda is a small company compared to its rivals, mostly seen these days trying to perfect the internal combustion engine, talking some shit about electric vehicles, and building a new rotary engine. Electric is the future, Mazda’s stance has been, but maybe a more distant one for us than others. Well, the future is almost here.
According to Automotive News, it will arrive at the Tokyo Motor Show next month. Mazda will have an electric car, the company confirmed, though what form that car will take is still under wraps. Mazda has apparently gone solo with this effort. Mazda tends to go solo with a lot of things, though it has also been working with Toyota on a different EV project.
From Automotive News:
The company engineered the vehicle internally, and the project is separate from the joint development work Mazda is doing as part of a Toyota-led electric vehicle consortium. Formed in 2017, that group includes Subaru, Suzuki and Toyota Group supplier Denso Corp.
The upcoming EV will be available in two forms — a full electric and a range extender. The full EV will target markets such as Japan, Europe and China, where an EV can get by with a shorter range. But the range extender is seen as necessary for North America and other markets where daily drives are much longer. The range extender is expected to be powered by a small rotary engine.
Automotive News says the electric car will make 105 kilowatts of power, or about 140 horsepower, suggesting that whatever this thing is it won’t be too huge. Probably some kind of small hatchback or crossover that we may never see in the U.S.
What it does announce to the world, though, is that Mazda is finally in the electric game, hopefully for good.