Gadgetory

so what is SKYACTIV technology basically and compresses the air fuel mixture to a much higher degree than you normally see in a production gas engine car up to 14 to 1 ratio which gas engines don't normally approach that's actually verging on diesel levels of compression what's the big deal well you get a lot more out of that bang when you do that so you make better use of the fuel and you get more power on the other hand there's a huge downside high compression engines want to predetonate or spark knock in other words combust before the spark plug even goes off that causes all kinds of problems with power durability and efficiency of fuel use so what do you do first of all they've created a very interesting exhaust architecture where these long exhaust runners carry the hot gases away and blend them farther from the engine that's good because one cylinder firing out hot gas doesn't burp it into an adjacent cylinder which a lot of other designs will do secondly they're using a Hemi head design you may have seen our video on what Hemi engines are all about it's a hemispherical dome in the head and a hemispherical piston that goes up there to fill it really compress everything they're doing that but they also have a little well carve down in the top of the piston which allows them to contain some of the detonation before it takes over the whole cylinder and finally they're using direct injection which a lot of carmakers are doing but that has a lot of benefits here it gives you very precise fuel metering so the gas isn't there until it really needs to be and can't blow up early and because it's injected right into the cylinder the gasoline is cooler because it didn't have to run down a hot intake runner and a hot intake port on its way to the cylinder that also helps prevent detonation until the spark wants it to happen bottom line mazda claims a 15% improvement in both fuel efficiency and torque using SKYACTIV but remember the typical gas engine only rings about 30% efficiency from a gallon of fuel wasting the remainder has dissipated heat so 15% better than that isn't exactly game-changing but it helps also the sky active cars that are sold in the US will have their compression ratio dropped to a still lofty thirteen to one a concession being made so we can feed them regular gas