The Mazda EZ-6 may be Chinese in origin, but it’s finding its way to Europe.
It’s pretty obvious by now that the Japanese car manufacturers are severely behind in the electric vehicle game. Most of waiting for for battery technology to advance for lower production costs while others are still hedging their bets on hydrogen or hybrid powertrains as the mainstream option for now. Regardless of the approach there are some markets where significant market share is being lost without effective competition from the Japanese brands and so a response must come. For Mazda, that response is to introduce their EZ-6 electric sedan to the European market as soon as possible.
The Mazda EZ-6 is a 4-door developed to rival the Tesla Model 3 and it shares its engineering with the Deepal SL03. Deepal is a sub-brand of Changan, with whom Mazda has a joint venture in China. The two companies also have an agreement on EV Export Cooperation, which could explain the EZ-6’s existence further. It should be noted that the new energy R&D and production comes from Changan while Mazda provides its expertise in dynamic performance tuning with expert from the Mazda Europe R&D centre validating the vehicle at the Chongqing Automobile Testing Grounds. First shown for the Chinese market, the Mazda EZ-6 can be outfitted as either a pure battery electric vehicle or also works as a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle.
The car features level 2.5 ADAS, a 7nm Qualcomm SA8155P chip, 4 HD cameras, 12 ultrasonic radars and has a slew of driver assistance features. The Mazda EZ-6 sedan has an electric range of 600km based on CLTC driving cycle but no powertrain or battery details have been confirmed yet. It will be the EV Mazda desperately needs in Europe to compete as its current MX-30 only gets 199km on a full charge on the WLTP driving cycle.
Does that mean we’ll see the Mazda EZ-6 in Malaysia? I am very doubtful unless the impetus comes from Changan as the creation of a right hand drive model necessitates quite a lot of spending and the returns may not be there unless an aggressive push to Australia, New Zealand, the UK and perhaps even Japan comes too.
