Mazda Announces Breakthrough In Long-Coveted Engine Technology (reuters.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Mazda Motor Corp said it would become the world's first automaker to commercialize a much more efficient petrol engine using technology that deep-pocketed rivals have been trying to engineer for decades, a twist in an industry increasingly going electric. The new compression ignition engine is 20 percent to 30 percent more fuel efficient than the Japanese automaker's current engines and uses a technology that has eluded the likes of Daimler AG and General Motors Co. Mazda, with a research and development (R&D) budget a fraction of those of major peers, said it plans to sell cars with the new engine from 2019. A homogeneous charge compression ignition (HCCI) engine ignites petrol through compression, eliminating spark plugs. Its fuel economy potentially matches that of a diesel engine without high emissions of nitrogen oxides or sooty particulates. Mazda's engine employs spark plugs under certain conditions, such as at low temperatures, to overcome technical hurdles that have hampered commercialization of the technology.

Comments

Re:I wanted to RFTA

[Scarred Intellect]

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mazda-strategy-idUSKBN1AO0E7

Or use the link in the title of the article

Link to the actual article

[denbesten]

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mazda-strategy-idUSKBN1AO0E7

It appears that the editor *actually read* the article, causing Reuters to scroll to the next story and change the URL. Will wonders never cease.

Re:Too little, too late

[Jack9]

> Fossil fuel vehicles are phased out in three years worldwide, no matter where you go

What do you mean by phased out? How much do you want to bet that fossil fuel vehicles will not only still be produced, but used more than electric in 3 years worldwide? I will be happy to escrow a few thousand dollars on my prediction (that's all I can spare and I will use the winnings for financing an electric vehicle). We can use active US car registrations as a measure, if you really want to go forward.

How many US families (from a very wealthy nation) do you think have the economic capacity to buy new electric vehicles, much less 2 year depreciated ones? How many of those will there be? Where's the infrastructure to power these vehicles? I know where many electric stations are from San Diego, CA to the Oregon border but you drive right by a Tesla facility who made that happen. In the rest of the northwest US, not so much. India? Hah.

I don't think your statement is well considered. Perhaps you have a skewed idea of what humans will tolerate to maintain an illusion of normalcy (spoiler: almost anything short-term to avoid committing to change).

Re:Too little, too late

[rickb928]

"Fossil fuel vehicles are phased out in three years worldwide,"

Um, no. The used car market makes that unlikely.

And when my 80 mile a day commute doesn't require fast charging at work to make it home with a 5-10% margin, most likely impacted by unpredictable traffic, I'm in. Or, do the other, mch harder thing - make my work, job stability, and income possible closer to home. I'll fix the 'problem' with more efficient cars over the next 10-12 ears, then 'retire'. Maybe.

Or, alternatively, start using honest, accurate data to judge climate change and influences. Go where the honest data leads you.

IC engine efficiency is hardly 20%

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

80% of the energy in the gasoline, goes out as heat in the tail pipe. Diesel engines use compression ignition (no spark plugs) already. The much "coveted" technology, if it works, would bring diesel engine efficiency to gasoline engines. That is all. The claimed benefit is reduction in pollution, not any improvement in efficiency over existing IC engines.

Now that we know how difficult it is to cut the emissions on diesel engines during start up and some driving conditions, it is probably a good thing. But it is not going to slow the long march towards hybrid and electric cars. It is more along the lines of streamlining steam locomotives.

Re:IC engine efficiency is hardly 20%

[Strider-]

The issue is that the NOx pollution from the Diesels is due to its thermal efficiency. In a properly running diesel, the flame in the cylinder is so hot that it causes the N2 from the atmosphere to momentarily disassociate, which in turn combines with the left over oxygen, producing oxides of nitrogen. By definition, diesels run extremely lean, so there's plenty of oxygen for this to happen, and 80% of the charge is nitrogen. Anyhow, the net result is that diesels tend to produce the most NOx at the most efficient point, which is right around their torque curve.

Gasoline engines, on the other hand, ideally operate at the stochiometric ratio; the oxygen in the charge air is completely consumed by the combustion. It sounds like Mazda has achieved diesel-like efficiency while maintaining the gasoline ratios, meaning that there is no left over oxygen to produce NOx. It'll be interesting to see if it works out and is reliable.

Re:IC engine efficiency is hardly 20%

[drinkypoo]

Gasoline engines don't run ideally. They run rich-lean-rich-lean. Then the catalyst averages it out, more or less.

Re:IC engine efficiency is hardly 20%

[drinkypoo]

I'd be surprised if that were true. Running rich would soon ruin the catalytic converter.

Well, prepared to be surprised with knowledge, the same knowledge you could have got from Wikipedia but which I knew before they even taught me in school in the prep class for the ASE A-6 because I care about how vehicles work. It's called "closed loop" operation, and it's how gasoline vehicles have worked since they got O2 sensors and electronic mixture control, which predates ubiquitous fuel injection substantially. In short, a reading is taken from the O2 sensor, and the mixture is adjusted... over and over again. When the computer detects that the mixture is rich, by O2 sensor voltage going down (because when it's heated, oxygen ions cause electrons to migrate across the metal junction in the sensor) then it adjusts mixture control on the carburetor with a little geared motor, or it adjusts the pulse width of the fuel injectors, and less fuel is delivered. This makes the mixture go lean. When an excessively lean mixture is detected, the mixture is enriched and then the mixture goes rich. Lather, rinse, repeat. This causes the mixture to yaw back and forth between rich and lean. This happens a certain number of times per second, which we call cross counts. As the sensor ages, it not only produces a lower maximum voltage, but it also reacts more slowly, and the cross counts go down. The cross counts are a factor of the sensor's health, the sampling rate of the PCM, and the adjustment speed of the mixture control. At the same time, the computer is continually building a table which tells it how much maximum fuel and timing advance it can deliver at a given RPM and load demand (throttle position) and this figure (with some correction based on coolant temperature sensor and other sensors) is used to determine how much fuel the PCM will choose to deliver at any given time.

Unburned hydrocarbons (aka raw fuel) are the single worst automotive emission, but from an emissions standpoint they are only a big problem when the vehicle is first started, and the catalyst is cold. At that time, it cannot burn off the excess HC. After that, the catalyst is hot, and burning off excess HC from the time when the engine is running rich is its primary job in life. It won't be too long before we get electrically heated catalysts, which start doing their job #1 sooner. A massive percentage of gasoline vehicle emissions are at startup time; these days, virtually all the HC that a vehicle will emit occurs then, and that's all thanks to the catalyst.

Man, I miss the days when Slashdot was peopled mostly with users who knew things.

Re:A better buggy whip?

[ickleberry]

Even before 1888 buggy whips were known to be pretty much useless; people had long figured out it was more effective to whip the horse rather than the buggy

Re:A better buggy whip?

[suutar]

Nah. Gasoline cars will not stop selling before 2019, and until they do, increasing efficiency for gas vehicles and reducing NO emissions from traditionally diesel form factors are both worthwhile enhancements. So if they're on schedule, this could be a big win for Mazda in terms of carving out a good chunk of the (assumed to be) tail years of the fossil fuel vehicle.

Convenience of electric - except in winter

[FeelGood314]

Electric cars are just more convenient. Once their range is close enough to gas no one will want to buy a new fossil fuel car. A few years after that gas stations will start disappearing. Once the stations and infrastructure start to die out the end of gasoline cars will be fairly quick. The one area where the internal combustion engine has a huge advantage is winter driving. Heating a car with an electric battery kills your distance and there aren't many good solutions. Insulation only gets you so far because you also have to dry the air in the car out or else the moisture will condense on the windows (try driving a car on a -20C morning with 3 kids in the back)

Re:Convenience of electric - except in winter

[caseih]

This is wishful thinking. It may be true in very dense urban centers, but it is less and less likely to be true anytime soon out in suburbia, and even less likely in rural areas where farms operate and grow food that everyone in the urban centers is dependent on.

Personally I'd love to see a day when I can have a fully-electric, battery-operated tractor, combine, or semi truck that can operate at high power output ranges for 12 hours or more at a stretch (and recharge very quickly). But realistically I don't expect to see this in my lifetime.

Re:Convenience of electric - except in winter

[AmiMoJo]

AC is better for keeping windows mist free than heat. My Leaf has a heat pump and AC system, so I normally blast both for maybe 20 seconds to fully de-mist the car when setting off (often automatically on a timer while it's still plugged in, so doesn't even touch the battery) and then just keep heat and AC on the minimum setting to maintain.

It ends up reducing range by 5-10%, depending on conditions and driving style.

Re:Convenience of electric - except in winter

[AmiMoJo]

Commercial vehicles like trucks and tractors don't need to operate for 12 hours at a stretch. Even the current EU laws don't allow humans to drive them continuously for that long without a break, and they will be some of the first vehicles to get fully antonymous driving (and charging) anyway.

300 miles range at 70 MPH is already available and already more than enough for human beings. If you are driving for more than 4 hours straight without a break, you are not driving safely.

Re:Convenience of electric - except in winter

[AmiMoJo]

I don't know... AC clear it in a few seconds, electrically heated windows take much longer. I don't really want to wait ages for the windscreen to clear.

I imagine the AC is more efficient than resistive heating too.

Worst trend in webdesign

[Optic7]

The never-ending single page is the worst trend in webdesign today, or perhaps ever. I was trying to reach the footer of some website the other day to get to info like "about", "contact us", or whatever, and it was absolutely impossible.

Re:Worst trend in webdesign

[Dagger2]

For what it's worth, if you have a Thingiverse account you can turn infinite scrolling off in the preferences. Unfortunately they only show 12 entries per page so it takes forever to go through them all, but at least there's no infinite scroll involved.

Re:Fantastic

[CustomSolvers2]

The properties of the fuels (e.g., how easily the f/a mixture might be ignited under certain conditions) explain the differences between both types of engines. So, there are very good reasons why compression-based ignition has been mostly focused on Diesel engines.

It is unclear what Mazda is planning to do to compensate the intrinsic limitations of gasoline on this front. Also HCCI is a pretty theoretical idea whose ambitious ultimate goal is to start the combustion almost simultaneously throughout the whole chamber. I don't think that close-to-100% HCCI has ever been reached even in Diesel.

Re:Too little, too late

[WillAffleckUW]

Not in the West.

If you live in the West, 40 percent of your contribution to climate change is from transportation.

Which is one of the reasons why we lead in electric and hybrid purchases.

Re:Too little, too late

[ledow]

Generators still exist.
Petrol engines are in everyday tools.
Ships and boats still run on diesel or petrol, and it might not be sensible to have a water-soaked battery.
Hospitals and datacentres have backup generators

There is more of a market for engines than just cars. The tech is transferable. And while diesel is polluting worse than we thought, a new type of petrol engine isn't exactly a dead loss.

And you still have 10 years before anyone ditches the cars that are in the vast, vast, vast majority now. Then another 10 years after that at least. At that point, electric cars need to have moved on 20 years in tech (including range) to compete. If they don't, there's another 20 years of business up for grabs.

If anything I think that all the emissions controls have make car manufacturer eke more out of less. My car is a 1.5L and it performs admirably.

Petrol engines aren't going anywhere anytime soon. At best, we'll have hybrids for a long time yet. Because just on sheer range, electrics are losing badly. When a significant percentage of people have them and start plugging them in at peak periods forcing infrastructure change (at the moment charging is all very "just plug it in" at the moment, and that's not necessarily sustainable), you're going to hit their weaknesses more too.

I give petrol engines 20 years of commercial viability just in vehicles at least. That's more than enough of a future to get 4-5 models of car out, make money, and plough it into research while licensing out the patents on stuff like this.

Re:I'll Be Amazed

[RingDev]

They make it work by being dual-mode. It only switches to compression ignition when it determines the appropriate conditions. A fair bit of the time, it'll be on standard spark ignition. Basically, they manage to control the intake and exhaust flow at a higher compression ratio that they can predict predet and control it.

The bigger problem I would expect, is getting it to pass emissions. I would guess that it'll do great on CO2, but it'll blow NOX worse than a Diesel.

At which point, your sentiment rings true. If you're going to have Diesel emissions, why not just have a Diesel engine and enjoy the perks that go with it?

-Rick

Re:A better buggy whip?

[EndlessNameless]

isn't pouring lots of resources into a 30% more efficient petrol engine in 2017 somewhat akin to inventing 'a better buggy whip' in 1888

Not entirely.

There are some heavy-use cases where electric will not be a viable replacement for a long time. E.g., the batteries required for industrial equipment and commercial trucks would be enormous in many cases.

Getting diesel-level efficiency without those nasty diesel emissions is a plus.

That said, I expect this will be a nice improvement until regular passenger vehicles convert to electric. The conversion to electric is somewhat dependent on improvements to battery capacity and charger availability, both of which are outside the direct control of the auto makers (Tesla being the notable exception).

Re:Too little, too late

[oddaddresstrap]

Even if your commute is 80 miles each way (160 miles RT), the Chevy Bolt or the Tesla Model (any) will give you at least a 30% margin in real-world traffic.

Re:I'll Be Amazed

[Strider-]

The bigger problem I would expect, is getting it to pass emissions. I would guess that it'll do great on CO2, but it'll blow NOX worse than a Diesel.

If they get their fuel/air mix right, there won't be a NOx issue as there won't be enough left over oxygen to produce NOx in significant quantities. Modern diesels produce it due to the high flame temperatures, and because by definition they run extremely lean. If they're running it like a gasoline engine, where the goal is to completely consume the oxygen in the charge air, then the NOx issues should be relatively well controlled.

Re:Too little, too late

[JaredOfEuropa]

In my country: 33% CO2 emissions from transportation (and we do a lot of that). Almost half of that is ships, the other half road transportation (47% of transport, or 15% of total). About half that is transport of people, making up just over 8% of total CO2. Swapping every single car and bus for an electric model charged with 100% renewable electricity will net you an 8% savings on CO2 (2014 figures). The actual savings are likely to be a lot lower, and come at considerable cost to people. Better to focus on something else?

Cars are a popular "environmental" target here because of the common misconception about these figures; it makes the seriously high taxes on them easy to sell as both the left and the right still feel guilty about driving.

Re:Too little, too late

[Strider-]

Yes, but they're still diesel engines. In theory, Diesel engines will burn pretty much anything flammable. Diesel himself originally tried to run his design on coal dust, before switching to peanut oil.

Diesel fuel as you buy it for road vehicles is basically No 2 fuel oil, which is pretty similar to heating oil and Jet-A/JP-5. There are subtle differences in the exact makeup, mostly related to lubricity (small diesels depend on the fuel to cool/lubricate the fuel pumps), and a few other specific properties.

Bunker fuel, aka No 6 aka Bunker C, is the crap left over after the lighter hydrocarbons have been distilled out of the crude. It's basically tar, and in order to be pumped around, and injected into the ship's engines, needs to be heated to some 100C to thin it out.

Re:Too little, too late

[angel'o'sphere]

Then you don't buy an electric car that only has a range of 160miles.
Wow, that was so simple again.
Sorry, that I had to put it so bluntly at you.

Oh please

[fyngyrz]

the overall cost of producing the electricity, in terms of pollution aren't that far apart [for fossil fuel ICEV and charging current for EV].

Yeah, actually the absolute pollution levels for these are quite far apart, and getting further apart every day. That's without even counting systems specifically designed to supply short-ride vehicles locally via solar. The efficiency of power production for vehicle charging at a fossil-fuel power plant, even after transmission losses to the charging point, is far better than an ICE can do on a per-vehicle basis. But don't let the facts stop you from spreading your fud. It seems to be the new normal anyway.

Re:Too little, too late

[110010001000]

There is always one idiot that claims he "needs" to regularly make 500 mile trips. Where are you going?

Re:I'll Be Amazed

[hord]

Hydrogen is far less volatile than gasoline. People have a fear of Hydrogen but it has a low energy density and dissipates very rapidly by floating away. Gasoline vapor is explosive with a very high energy content and the liquid itself adheres to surfaces easily and will burn on the surface of water. The biggest issue with using hydrogen as a fuel is simply that it takes too much energy to make a decent quantity of it. It sticks to everything and you have to input energy to unstick it.

Re: Too little, too late

[kwbauer]

Nobody is moving goalposts with that -20 below. That is the norm in a northern Midwest winter for about a month.

Re:Too little, too late

[jshackney]

OTR Sales people, LargeCorp(TM) Regional Managers, etc. These folks usually drive cars out of warranty within 12 months or less.

Re:Too little, too late

[Rei]

90 minutes? What year is this, 2005? Supercharging is half an hour to 80%. And herp, derp, humans have to eat at some point.

And I love how much you're willing to damn an EV for even the slightest increase in long-distance trip time (most people taking 500 mile trips rather rarely), but are perfectly content to need to at random intervals in your normal everyday life have to divert from your schedule and go out of your way to a gas station, stand outside in whatever weather there is and pump gasoline (which gives off carcinogenic fumes) in a "shithole". And FYI, gas stations are much more likely to be "shitholes" than superchargers. Here's a random list of supercharger photo pictures (flickr, so it should be by and large just random people's snapshots). How much of a "shithole" do they look like to you?

Re:Too little, too late

[Rei]

And people like you are the reason for the high rate of freeway accidents.

News flash: You're Not Supposed To Drive For 8 Hours Straight. You're supposed to take breaks every few hours. Stop endangering other drivers because you don't want to waste 15 minutes here and there to get out and stretch.

This post is independent of what you think of EVs. I don't care what sort of car you drive, but stop putting other people at risk because you're in a rush.

Charge points are relatively simple installs

[Paul Fernhout]

"I stop to eat at roadside inns which are likely never to have charging points,"

It's much easier for a business to put in a charging point connected to their existing electric lines than to install a gas pump and underground gas tanks. So why would a roadside inn not install charge points to increase (or maintain) business?

With EVs, any roadside business can now be a gas station -- but without dealing with the costs or regulations.

Re:Charge points are relatively simple installs

[apoc.famine]

This is something I never considered. Thanks!
 
Interesting that if you're one of two B&Bs in a town, the supercharger investment might be a business draw, and potentially something you could write off on your taxes. I can see this mentality adding to a rapid increase in deployment once a certain threshold of electric cars are on the road. It might not make sense this year, but within a few years, it might well be another way to entice customers, like free wifi is now.

Re:I wanted to RFTA

[rtb61]

What is missing in the story is the likely use of those new fangled infernal combustion engines. They sound pretty fussy and as such likely they will run best at set revolutions with a set load, so as the power supply for generators in hybrid vehicles. Probably what made those engines really difficult to develop, is they were fussy with regard to efficiency at different revolutions under different loads, becoming real inefficient outside of a specific range, but with fixed revolution and load, powering generators to charge batteries, they will work a lot better. So the motor is being specifically developed because of electric vehicles but the development might not be fast enough (although the military with desires for greater ranges might be the main market).

Re:I'll Be Amazed

[mr.mctibbs]

Hydrogen, which boils at twenty degrees *Kelvin,* is less volatile than gasoline? I'll have whatever you're smoking.

Re:Too little, too late

[Rei]

The differences between the efficiency gains of using gas/diesel over using a horse were staggering

It really was not, and it would benefit you to read about the early history of the automobile before discussing it.

At the turn of the century there were 27000 miles of roads in the US. Almost virtually all unpaved. Ever wonder why early "horseless carriages" had those giant wagon wheels? It was to try to stop them from bogging down. Guess what? They still bogged down almost all the time. Early gas "stations" were sporadic, and weren't really "stations", just shops that happened to carry petrol. Sometimes they had a hand pump to dispense it; sometimes just bottles. You never knew what exactly you were putting into your car and whether it would be compatible. The cars were constantly breaking down. An important part of owning an early car was also learning to disassemble and fix it; if you wanted to be a car owner, you also needed to be a car mechanic.

Early cars were seen as a luxury toy for wealthy city dwellers, serving mainly as an annoyance and hazard to "normal" people. Lots of places passed anti-car ordinances as a consequence - widely supported by the local populace. These included things like having to have people with flags march alongside cars to make sure that the way was safe for pedestrians. Some places required cars to pull off the road if a horse was nearby and cover it up until the horse was past. For a couple decades, cars were really disdained by a large segment of the populace. It took nearly fifty years for cars to fully dislodge the horse. Half a century for your supposed "staggering" difference.

You bring up the Model T, as if it was the start of the automotive industry. It was an important step in it, but anything but the start. Wealthy people began buying horseless carriages and making "road trips" with them in the 1880s, two decades earlier. And it was really a miserable car to drive (ask anyone who's ever driven one). It came out only five years after the first cross-country drive in the US, by Horatio Nelson Jackson. Jackson's first breakdown was only 15 miles into the trip. He paid the equivalent of $130 per gallon for fuel at times. He was constantly having to ship parts across the country to replace things that broke or outright fell off, and to bike, horse ride, or walk dozens of miles to buy fuel when the car couldn't make it. At one point he was stranded for 36 hours without food until a shepherd found him and fed him. The whole trip took 63 1/2 days.

Your math for how fast an early car driver could hypothetically travel doesn't even remotely match the reality. The only reason he made it is because of the constant resupply lines by horse and train. It wasn't until the first cross-country highways in the 1920s like Route 66 that cross-country car travel really became practical.

1 Electric semi going the same distance with a presumed 400 mile range (information on google is sparse as far as the range of a pure battery powered Semi truck) will mean a required 90 minute (or more depending on number of chargers vs chargers in use) stop

Yeah, try again.

The reason you can't find specs for Tesla's Semi is because it hasn't had its public debut yet. However, Tesla's other cars' ranges of 220-335mi, increased slightly due to advances over time, are probably reasonable. Say, 300 mi.

Tesla's current charging standard is 30 minutes to 80%. This is with internal cooling. Tesla has been patenting external cooling of battery packs and charger cables, which offers significant potential for faster heat withdrawal from battery packs (the main limiting factor for battery life in fast charging). It also allows for much higher powers without increasing charging cable thickness.

Simultaneous with Semi, Tesla is working on Supercharger V3. Not many details have been leaked out on it yet, except that when asked if it would be 350kW, Mus