Going the extra mile: Into the wilderness with Mazda’s rotary-powered range extender

An icy road clinging to the remote, windswept mountains of Iceland’s northwest peninsula seems like a good place to talk about range anxiety. The sun is rapidly sinking towards the horizon, we’re several hours’ drive away from the nearest town and the battery indicator on the Mazda MX-30 R-EV is showing just 15 km of range remaining. This is emphatically not somewhere that you want to run out of charge.

Fortunately, Mazda has a solution. Like the standard MX-30, the R-EV is electrically driven at all times, with a modestly-sized lithium ion battery that reduces the cost and environmental impact of manufacturing the powertrain. Mazda refers to this philosophy as ‘right-sizing’. It’s about providing the sort of range that most people need in day-to-day driving, rather than sizing the system to cope with the rare occasions when they might find themselves driving the length of the M1 or crossing the Icelandic wilderness.