Though the Japanese manufacturer denied any interest in ever producing a hybrid Mazda has recently announced that it plans to produce gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles in its lineup at some point during the next decade. According to the announcement the company won’t release new vehicles, but will produce hybrid variants of regular production models.
The company spokesman told that first units of hybrid cars are expected by 2010.
“It’s going to be the 20-teens that we’re going to be actually engineering all this,” Executive Vice President Philip Spender said at the Japanese media launch of the 2010 Mazda Axela (Mazda3 for North America).
“And we’re actually trying to pull that forward, if we can.”
The company was unsure whether to produce hybrids or not. In early April, the company announced that it won’t build electric cars or hybrids but will improve its existing traditional gasoline engines and transmissions achieve better mileage. After only two weeks, CEO Takashi Yamanouchi revealed that Mazda will actually build some hybrids but the very first models won’t arrive sooner than 2015.
“We’ve started to talk a lot more about it lately, in part because everybody else is,” Spender said. “We now know what the carbon dioxide targets are. We now know what our fleet performance and our gaps are.”
