Japanese-born Ichiro Hirose (52) is rather enjoying himself in Europe. He gets to drive cars quickly on open roads, judging the distance between his car and oncoming vehicles with an engineer’s precision. He demonstrates this with his hands held a few feet apart and a smile. In particular, he likes the swoops and cambers of Europe’s roads.
The head of Mazda’s European research and development since April last year wants his cars to feel like the rod in an angler’s hands as he casts out across the river or like the club held by a golfer as he goes through his swing – a natural extension of the body.
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Hirose appreciates flat-out autobahn driving in Germany but prefers the country roads around the automaker’s R&D headquarters in Oberursel, north west of Frankfurt. He describes his task as making sure that the cars maintain an emotional connection with their drivers – and that is something that can only be done in Europe, he believes.
“We need to be able to drive at speed with predictability and we can do that in Germany and elsewhere in Europe.
“Also here, we can drive prototypes on public roads which we can’t do in Japan. Europe has vehicle-friendly countries,” he said.
He joined the carmaker when he was 23 and has worked in powertrain and engine development since 1994. In 2006, he was part of the initial team given the ‘clean sheet’ brief to develop what became SkyActiv, Mazda’s much-praised reworking of the internal combustion engine, transmissions and lightweight body construction.
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By GlobalDataThe target was to increase the efficiency of engines from 30% to 40%. The results are well documented – raising the compression ratio of the petrol engine to 14:1 being one of the more headline-grabbing solutions.
“We had engineers from other companies calling us to ask if that was really what we were doing,” he said. “They couldn’t believe we could do it and thought we must have hidden something.”
With the second generation, the target is 50% efficiency.
For the first generation, engineers worked hard to reduce losses through friction and combustion; one thing they didn’t touch was the efficiency gains that could be achieved by reducing pumping losses. That, and working on homogeneous charging – diesel compression ignition for petrol engines – are two key areas for the second generation, he said.
Mazda began to promote the technology in 2010 and has since undertaken technical exchanges with other companies. It was, Hirose said, a remarkable achievement for a small company.
He moved to Europe last year as SkyActiv was launched in the region. Europe, he said, is the best place for R&D and will help him and his team add the all-important ‘emotional value’ to future products.
“Our competitors are getting stronger so we must provide emotional value to differentiate ourselves. Blackberry is not an iPhone and that emotional value you get with an iPhone is what we need to create and we can only do that in Europe.”
But the automaker isn’t betting the family jewels on new technology alone. It has a long history of developing hydrogen, fuel cell and hybrid powered vehicles. And here the breakthrough will also benefit buyers. The extra-efficiency of the new powertrains means that smaller electric motors and lighter batteries can be used to achieve the required reductions in emissions while maintaining the driving pleasure.
“We are a small company but with SkyActiv we did something all-new. Even people inside the company didn’t believe we could develop a new chassis and a new engine and that kind of success and belief is what I bring to the team in Europe,” he said.
