Mazda Plans To Be The First To Market With A Compression Ignition Engine

Yawn. I couldn't care less about Skycraptiv II.

This is so systemic of Mazda i.e. to waste money on engine technology when their vehicle lineup isn't exactly causing a stampede to dealers. They wasted money for years on the rotary and never made it viable. They wasted money on a 1.8 liter V6. Now this.

Interesting, I like car companies that think and act more like engineering companies vs. just marketing vessels

There is no point in doing engineering if it does not result in a product that generates sales. If sales are not generated, you have spent money on NOTHING.

The RX8 was fun, but an MX8 (piston version) would have easily sold more.

Mazda is heading for being an acquisition.

Tell that to TVR

@Firewombat You proved my point by that mention. TVR has almost always used other companies' engineering so as to make money given their sales volume and even then, they've had ups and downs. Their demise was exacerbated by engineering costs for the Speed 6 and then Speed 12 engines which drained capital when they could have just gone with GM's LS V8. Had they NOT decided to dump money into engineering engines, they may very well have been able to keep going. Thankfully Les Edgar is repurposing a LOT of engineering done elsewhere. All of the Gordon Murray technology already existed so designing a TVR had minimal cost. Similarly, the Coyote/Voodoo V8 is pretty much off-the-shelf from the Mustang. Cosworth's contributions were pretty much relegated to designing manifolds.

I appreciate your response but that's a lot of detail to come to the conclusion that a company went down the drain even though it didn't do a lot of its own base engineering. So I still agree with you, no point going down the road of engineering a car, or borrowing engineering to build a car, if no one buys it or if it's constantly stuck in bankruptcy mode because the engineering, borrowed or not, is so bad it can't lure enough customers in.

I truly wish them success, and I hope this new technology proves to have some *substantial* advantages without any drawbacks. Otherwise, it'll become a non-event, or more cynically, just another marketing gimmick.

For interested parties, here's a video describing the new technology and explaining the real-world benefits, should it deliver as promised:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBkfOUaEcWM