Mazda SKYACTIV-X compression ignition petrol engines as ECONOMICAL as a diesel

Mazda’s next generation of petrol engines – SKYACTIV-X  – will use compression ignition to deliver economy that’s at least as good as a diesel engine.

Car buyers may have been coerced in to diesel-engined cars thanks to misguided government incentives based on their CO2 output, but the truth is, and always has been, that diesels do us more damage thanks to their NOx and particulate emissions than the once ubiquitous petrol engine ever did.

But car makers around the world responded to the diesel push by making them refined, relatively clean and immensely ‘tourquey’. And buyers loved that combination of low-down grunt and improved economy.

But as the world turns against diesel (too late, really) the petrol engine is fighting back, and Mazda’s next-generation petrol engines – SKYACTIV-X – look set to match anything a diesel can manage.

For the first time in a commercially produced engine, Mazda has managed to make compressed ignition viable on a petrol engine. That’s the same sort of ignition diesels use, where the fuel air mixture combusts under pressure without the need of a spark.

The compressed ignition works at low loads (higher loads do still use a spark), but it means it takes much less fuel to create the same combustion in normal driving. 

The result is Mazda can deliver an improvement of 10-30 per cent in torque and 20-30 per cent in efficiency compared to the current SKYACTIVE-G engines, and economy at least the equivalent of the SKYACTIV-D diesel engine.

Mazda say development is still ongoing on the SKYACTIV-X engines, but they will be introducing them in 2019. 

Can’t come too soon.