Dreams of RWD, straight-six Mazda6 crushed

“BEFORE I joined Mazda, I actually took a test with another car company as well.” These are the words of Akira Tamatani, chief designer of Mazda’s bold new CX-60 SUV. 

“Both companies said they would hire me, but I picked Mazda – the reason being that Mazda offered rear-wheel drive vehicles and had longitudinally-mounted engines. They had the 929 with its longitudinal engine, and the RX-7 with the rotary engine – to me, it was a very sporty company. That’s the reason why I decided to join Mazda.”

It is not hard to find driving enthusiasts within the upper echelons of Mazda’s staff, which is perhaps why the company has retained its reputation as a Japanese car-maker with soul. 

MrTamatani might be 34 years older than he was when he joined Mazda in 1988, but it is obvious that his passion for sporty cars with driven wheels at the back has not faded.

“For me, a RWD vehicle is something I really wanted to design, and now I’ve been given the opportunity to design this kind of thing, with this kind of packaging. I was so excited when I learned about it,” he enthused while talking with GoAuto at a recent CX-60 preview event in Melbourne.

Since the demise of the RX-8 in 2011, the list of Mazda’s longitudinally-engined offerings has been short – just the MX-5 and the BT-50.

That is set to change with the Australian arrival of the box-fresh CX-60 slated for the middle of 2023, with its all-new large vehicle platform that puts the engine in a north-south orientation with its flywheel pointing toward the rear axle. 

While all Aussie-delivered CX-60s will be all-wheel drive by default, that AWD system will feature a heavily rearward torque bias to give it a much sportier driving feel than typical medium SUVs. Think of it as Mazda’s take on the BMW X3, or Mercedes-Benz GLC-Class. 

However, whereas the X3 and GLC are accompanied by the 3 Series and C-Class sedans in their respective showrooms, the prospect of Mazda spinning its own longitudinally-engined sports sedan off its shiny new platform appears slimmer than initially thought.

According to Mr Tamatani, the idea of a new-generation Mazda 6 with RWD and the turbo inline six of the CX-60 may only ever exist within a thought bubble.

“Since the vehicle height would be lower than the SUVs, I don’t think we can apply the same platform,” Mr Tamatani told GoAuto.

According to the designer, physical constraints built into the architecture put a limit on just how adaptable Mazda’s new ‘large product group’ platform can be. 

“The large group platform architecture is designed mainly for SUVs,” he explained, revealing that minimum ground clearance for vehicles based on the new underpinnings is “something like 150mm to 160mm”.

Although a ground clearance of 150mm would not be completely unusual for a mid-size sedan, that critical dimension may still look too ‘jacked up’ to align with Mazda’s own design ideals.

After all, a Toyota Camry measures in with a ground clearance of 145mm these days, and sportier RWD offerings like the aforementioned BMW 3 Series sit just 130mm off the deck in M340i guise, or 120mm for the hardcore M3.

While the MX-5 is a different beast and may be able to continue using its current platform into the future, rear-drive passenger cars are a different challenge. The answer, according to Mr Tamatani, is the creation of another RWD platform for non-SUV products.

“If we can make a success of the large-platform products, then maybe after that we can have a path for such a model (new-generation Mazda 6),” he said,

“For new sportscars and passenger cars, creating a new platform for those cars would need us to take certain steps to be able to take that action. Of course we have a passion to do that, but we need to take certain steps to get there.”

Mazda already has another brand-new platform in the works, but it is not designed for longitudinally-mounted engines.

In fact, it is not designed with any engines in mind as Mazda’s next architecture will be purely for battery-electric vehicles, but unlike the CX-60’s underpinnings it will have the flexibility to accommodate a much broader size range and is set to make its debut between 2025 and 2027. 

With the company recently raising its EV sales target to 40 percent of its global sales by 2030 (it was previously just 25 percent), the new EV-only platform is arguably a much higher priority within Mazda’s research and development departments than reincarnating the Mazda 6 as a fun-to-drive RWD sedan with a turbo six.

Perhaps once the EV milestones are achieved and a business case for a new passenger sedan appears, Mazda may allocate resources towards bringing some RWD joy back to its non-SUV range.

Hopefully, the fresh-faced graduate designers entering a career at Mazda right now will not have to wait 34 years before they get to start penning such a machine.