Small electric SUV is joined by a range-extender version with a novel rotary engine On sale Now Price from £31,250
Dan Jones dan.jones@haymarket.com
FIRST DRIVE
TO BE A SUCCESSFUL YouTuber, you need something that sets you apart from the hoard of other budding creators, whether it’s the way you behave on camera or a visual trademark; a simple flat cap could be enough to stand out.
If Mazda was a YouTuber, its ‘flat cap’ would be the rotary engine – a curious beast with spinning rotors in place of pistons, making it smaller, smoother and lighter than most other engines. Mazda championed this tech for 60 years before retiring it in 2012, but now it’s back. It might not be the comeback that fans are hoping for, though; Mazda once put rotaries in sports cars, in which they sacrificed fuel economy for performance, but the engine’s new mission is to make the flawed MX-30 electric SUV more appealing.
You see, the regular, fully electric MX-30 has an official range of just 124 miles, and that severely compromises its usefulness. But with a lightweight petrol rotary engine on board to serve as a generator, this MX-30 R-EV should manage 400 miles of non-stop driving.
The MX-30 R-EV’s 830cc, single-rotor engine never drives the wheels directly. Instead, it’s there to top up the 17.8kWh battery that powers the electric motor. Such a set-up is nothing new; the Nissan Qashqai e-Power uses a conventional engine to do a similar job. However, the Qashqai has a much smaller battery, and its petrol engine runs almost continuously; the MX-30 R-EV can officially travel for up to 53 miles in electric mode, with the engine kicking in only when the battery is empty or if you give the accelerator a heavy prod. It’s unobtrusive when running, too.
If you mainly cover short distances, you can use the R-EV as a pure electric car, but the engine is always on hand if you need to go farther afield. As with a plug-in hybrid (PHEV), though, you’ll need to charge the battery regularly if you want to get the best economy.
With 168bhp, the R-EV is slightly more powerful than the regular, 143bhp MX-30; the 0-62mph sprint drops from 9.7sec to 9.1sec. That’s no huge improvement on paper, but it’s worth having in pract
