A lifetime in the car business, first engineering, now communicating

While automakers have been gradually withdrawing from using auto shows in the US as a platform to unveil new vehicles, some shows in other regions are still going relatively strong, especially in China. The Japan Mobility Show is coming up this week in Tokyo and most of the major domestic automakers are unveiling interesting new vehicles including Mazda which has two concepts, the Vision X-Coupe and Vision X-Compact.

For enthusiasts the coupe is particularly interesting and more details have been revealed about it. At five meters long, it’s about the same length as a Genesis G80 but in typical Mazda fashion of late, it has a very cab rearward design. The overall look is a continuing evolution of the brand’s Kodo design language which can be visualized by thinking of a pebble that’s been smoothed out over many years in a stream.

The lines of the Vision X-Coupe are long and lean and fluid with a long hood and swept back cabin. In many ways it’s a continuation of the theme from the 2023 Iconic SP concept although applied to a much larger vehicle. Like the sports car concept from two years ago, the new concept also uses a plug-in hybrid powertrain with a two-rotor Wankel engine.

While almost no specifications were given in 2023, this time Mazda is claiming that the car will go about 100 miles on a charge of its battery and another 400 miles with the engine running. Mazda claims a combined 503-hp from the engine and electric motor.

The beauty of rotary engines is that they are very compact and power dense. The downside has always been that they have been very inefficient and consume oil. To address the sustainability of this engine, Mazda is developing a renewable fuel produced from micro-algae. Algae cells contain a lot of oil that can be extracted to produce liquid fuels and the remaining material is rich in protein and can be upcycled into animal feed or fertilizer.

So that takes care of the input side, but burning even a renewable fuel like this still produces carbon dioxide. For that, Mazda has developed a mobile carbon capture system that pulls the CO2 from the exhaust stream. The CO2 is presumably stored on-board in a tank and then off-loaded when fueling. We don’t have details yet on how this will work, but assuming Mazda can successfully capture the CO2, it will take a long time to build out an infrastructure to off-load it somewhere and then repurpose it for agriculture or other applications.

Mazda plans to demonstrate both the fuel and carbon capture later this year on a race car. But we probably won’t see either of these technologies in production before at least the 2030s. Something like this car however, is very doable in the next few years.

The second concept is the Vision X-Compact which as the name implies is a compact hatchback. At about 150-inches long, it’s a few inches less than a Mini Cooper 2-door and a few inches longer than a Fiat 500. Its look incorporates the Kodo design language but with radically different proportions from the Vision X-Coupe. This is very much a city car but aside from the appearance, Mazda is emphasizing the integration of AI or more specifically “empathetic AI”.

It will talk to the driver and provide compliments when they make a smooth merge or alert them when there is something in their blindspot. While it’s unclear when this type of AI chatbot will arrive in vehicles, or frankly whether anyone actually wants this, Mazda does plan to start rolling out Google Gemini in production models next year. Something that looks like this concept also seems likely to arrive on roads in the not too distant future as well.

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Mazda Unveils 2 Concepts At Japan Mobility Show