What do the Mazda Cosmo, RX-7, RX-8 and 748B have in common? All these models were equipped with the famous rotary or twin-rotor engine invented in 1929 by engineer Félix Wankel, who developed it on behalf of the German NSU in 1951. But due to excessive CO2 emissions and therefore As a consequence, the production of rotary engines ended in 2012.
Yet Mazda never gave up hope of reusing its twin-rotor engine. Moreover, in 2012, during the Moscow Motor Show, Takashi Yamanouchi, director of Mazda, announced to our colleagues at PistonHeads that the rotary engine was far from dead and buried: “I joined Mazda in 1967 and what motivated me was the rotary engine […]. And in my current position, I am committed to continuing the development of the engine“. However, the latter dashed the last hopes of the aficionados of this engine: “The rotary engine has very good dynamic performance, but it is not so good in terms of economy when accelerating and decelerating. However, with a range extender, you can run a rotary engine at a constant 2000 rpm, at its best performance. It is also compact“. (source: PistonHeads)
Principle of operation of a Wankel engine © Y_tambe — CC BY-SA 4.0
Ten years later, Takashi Yamanouchi’s promise is coming true with the return of a new rotary engine as a range extender, just as he predicted.
This extension (or range extender), the technical characteristics of which are not known, will be integrated into the MX-30 electric SUV, which appeared in 2020. If we refer to the Mazda 2 Range Extender prototype of 2013, the rotary motor does not drive the wheels, but rather serves as a generator to recharge the batteries. The advantage of such a motor is its compactness and weight.
At the Tokyo Auto Show in 2019, Mazda presented its first electric vehicle, the MX-30. © Erick Fontaine / Lesnumériques
This new electric SUV, called MX-30 R-EV, will be officially presented on Friday January 13, 2023 at the Brussels Motor Show. In addition, Mazda unveiled a new logo: an “e” inside a triangle, alluding to the shape of a rotary engine.
The contribution of this extender will compensate for the lack of autonomy of the previous MX-30, whose technical sheet announced 200 kilometers in mixed use and 262 km in urban use, according to the WLTP cycle. During our road tests, we rather measured 180 km of autonomy.