Amongst the bright lights and swooping shapes on the Mazda booth at the 2025 Japan Mobility Show, a fascinating piece of technology was quietly revealed that might change the fortunes of combustion engines. Attached to the exhaust system on the Vision X-Coupe concept’s turbocharged, twin-rotary plug-in hybrid powertrain is a direct carbon-capture device that removes carbon from its exhaust fumes before it leaves the tip.
In effect the system acts as a filter within the exhaust system, pulling carbon dioxide out from the exhaust gases. The science is similar to that seen in larger scale atmospheric carbon-capture systems, except the gases coming out of a car’s exhaust system generally have a carbon density of around 350 times that of the air around it, making it more efficient to capture.
Mazda will continue to experiment with the technology, including altering the temperature of the exhaust gases to make the carbon-capture process more efficient.
But this is only half of Mazda’s plan to decarbonise the running of a combustion engine, as this could work in tandem with low-carbon or carbon neutral e-fuels. These have a much smaller, and in some cases negligible, carbon footprint.
Mazda even says that with just a 10 per cent capture rate, running a car on its algae-based e-fuels would actually be a carbon-negative process, when considered in tandem with the carbon capture that goes into the manufacture of those types of e-fuels.
As a proof of concept, Mazda will run a prototype system on a racing car that’ll compete in the Super Taikyu Series endurance race with a Mazda Spirit Racing competition car.
In the short term, this might not single-handedly decarbonise the ICE-powered cars we love, but it could be part of the solution to bringing them as close as possible to zero emission.
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