Mazda has no fear of being left behind in EV race

Mazda Australia has no fear of appearing old-fashioned or behind its competition as electrification becomes prolific across the global automotive industry.

While Mazda has proclaimed a target of offering an ‘electrified’ version of each of its models by 2030, which would entail hybrids as well as EVs, its goal seems tepid at best compared to the grand promises of its rivals. The even includes former electrification outlier Toyota, which has pledged 30 new EVs by the same year.

Industry-wide, European brands have been legislated into offering EVs – Volkswagen pushing the electric agenda significantly, as is the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance and Honda. Even the US’s Big Three have all embraced plans for electrification.

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In Australia, Honda was the first brand to sell a hybrid here with the Insight introduced in 1997 – a quarter of a century ago now – pipping Toyota’s Prius for bragging rights. The market has changed rapidly in that time, with the Toyota RAV4 Hybrid the first electrified vehicle to be the nation’s best-selling car outright in August 2020.

Mazda’s first production EV went on sale here in mid-2021 with the MX-30 E35, criticised for its limited range, with a range-extender rotary version confirmed for 2023. The recently announced CX-60 will include a 48V mild-hybrid option, but will be only the second nameplate from the brand to offer electrification.

While it has also recently patented a supercharged two-stroke rotary engine and has been experimenting with hydrogen for decades, Mazda is not interested in merely keeping up appearances.

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“We know we need to remain relevant and competitive,” said Mazda Australia's marketing manager, Alastair Doak.

“We have mild hybrids in the range already [MX-30], we’ve got some very efficient diesels and other things, so, we’ve always said the strategy with SkyActiv was to improve the internal combustion engine, and we’ll continue to do that.

“We’ll add electrification as we go along, and we’ve been very true to that. We’ve bought MX-30 EV out as well; that’s a city-based EV, it was done very specifically for Europe, we decided to bring it out here to teach our dealers as much as anything [to] get used to the electrification technology,” said Doak.

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“If you drive that car, we’re definitely thinking about the throttle response, the noise it makes – there’s a real depth there in our engineering, and that was really [to] set a baseline for the other electrification and EV stuff we’ll learn from there and keep going.

“We think we’ll be competitive, and the reality is – 70,000 EVs sold here last year out of a million cars. We understand we need to remain competitive in terms of what customers are demanding, so I think over the years we’ve done a reasonable job at doing that, and our plan is to continue to do that.”