The Mazda Hydrogen Rotary Engine Hybrid
For a while now we’ve had the technology for hydrogen cars, electric cars, bio diesel cars and more. Mazda has been doing research on hydrogen vehicles. After all, the company has been sure in showing very keen interest in this type of vehicle. What if your car ran on something else other than gasoline? First you have the issue of how far it can go on a fill-up or charge. We need to develop ways to store enough energy in the available space with the available technologies. This presents a problem with some of the technologies, including electric and hydrogen. The second problem is availability of fuel wherever you might want to go. Until more customers buy a fuel, it won’t be cost effective for service stations to offer it.
Years have passed and the interest on hydrogen vehicles has not yet waned for Mazda. And many enthusiasts are on guard and trying to see what developments the company has in store for the future. So what’s the solution? How are we going to move from conventional to alternative fuels, as we must do? We need cars that can run on an alternative fuel but also have a gasoline backup. They will greatly reduce our use of gasoline immediately, while providing the flexibility to use something we know we can rely on. Mazda’s new Premacy Hybrid runs on Hydrogen and gasoline. This increases its range to about 125 miles, double that of the Mazda RX-8 Hydrogen RE of 3 years ago. That’s still less than conventional fuel cars. Is it enough? For a lot of people it probably is. Especially when you consider the lower fuel costs and the fact that it produces far lower emissions.
To reduce the risk of abnormal combustion or detonation, the rotary was sustained with separate chambers for the intake and combustion strokes, making it ideal for hydrogen-fuel use. But you won’t see any new Mazda Premacy Hybrids on the road in the U.S. This technology is still in the experimental stage. Mazda has just leased a few of these cars to Iwatani, an energy development company in Japan. They’ll use the cars for business purposes and provide feedback to Mazda. Will hydrogen hybrids become a viable option in the U.S.? It’s difficult to say. A lot depends on the advances that Mazda is able to make on hydrogen technology and on how well other technologies, especially electric hybrids, perform.
