What's the news?
Mazda's not actually at the Paris Motor Show this week, but the Japanese car maker may just have taken some of the wind out of Paris' sails by finally giving enthusiasts what they've been asking for - the return of the rotary engines.
Hold on, don't start breaking out your 'I Love My RX-7' t-shirts just yet. Mazda isn't committing to making a new rotary-engine sports car. Such a car would likely not be able to get past current emissions legislation, but a small, compact, light rotary engine could help Mazda develop its new range of electric cars - the rotary is coming back as a range-extender.
Mazda has said that it's going to build two dedicated electric vehicles and, rather like the BMW i3, one will be purely powered by batteries, while the other will have a rotary engine on board to top up the charge on the move.
Rotaries are ideal for this sort of role, as they can be made to be very light and very small, and they have almost no vibration, so chances are that the engine could kick in to charge the batteries without you knowing about it. Mazda says that the new rotary engine is being designed with ultra-clean-burning liquified petroleum gas (LPG) in mind, although rotaries can burn just about anything you put in them, so other fuel variants will doubtless be available.
Mazda has also said that it wants, by 2030, 95 per cent of the cars it makes to be hybrids of some sort or other (and it's teamed up with Toyota to speed up its hybrid developments), while the remaining five per cent will be fully-battery EVs.
By 2050, Mazda says that it wants to have cut its 'Well to Wheel' CO2 emissions (in other words, the full spread of emissions of building a car, as well as running it once it's sold) by some 90 per cent.