By driving smarter, autonomous cars have the potential to move people in and around cities with far greater efficiency. Their projected energy performance, however, has largely ignored their energy inputs, such as the electricity consumed by brawny on-board computers. First-of-a-kind modeling shows that autonomy’s energy pricetag could be high enough to turn some into net energy losers.
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Mazda’s Hybrid-free Strategy of Necessity
How to make sense out of the bewildering differences in strategy by automakers today? In the case of Mazda, which rejects hybrid vehicles as a fad, the strategy may be one of necessity.
Mazda R&D chief Seita Kanai confirmed last week that Mazda still has no plans to commercialize its own hybrid technology, according to a report last week in Automobile Magazine. The Japanese automaker markets a hybrid version of its Tribute, a small SUV, which Automobile Magazine writes off as a Ford engineered system closely resembling the technology in Ford’s Hybrid Escape. Kanai said Mazda will achieve mandated fuel economy savings by improving engines and transmissions, and by redesigning vehicles to reduce their weight.
But Kanai also admitted at the same event for reporters in Japan last week that Mazda couldn’t afford to field a hybrid. And he acknowledged that the resulting technology gap represented a worrisome problem for the company with buyers enamored of hybrids. Here’s how Kanai put it, according to Automotive News:
“We’re in real trouble,” Kanai said of the rapidly falling hybrid prices. “It’s a threat. We don’t have the resources to get involved in that kind of competition.”
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Peter Fairley 