Mazda Investing Big In Advanced Gasoline Tech With Skyactiv-X

Electric cars, as a concept, were once not dissimilar from the flying car. Promised to be a big thing in the future, but hopelessly impractical in the here and now. However, in the last ten years, they’ve become a very real thing, with market share growing year on year as …read more

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Mazda’s new BT-50 might be the prettiest pickup truck on road or trail

Mazda launched the all-new BT-50 this week and immediately got heads turning around the truck world. It switches platforms from the Ford Ranger to Isuzu D-Max, and in so doing injects some serious in-house design flair. It massages the rough edges away… Continue reading Mazda’s new BT-50 might be the prettiest pickup truck on road or trail

Turn a Car Into a Game Controller

The CAN bus has become a staple of automotive engineering since it was introduced in the late ’80s, but in parallel with the spread of electronic devices almost every single piece of equipment inside a car has been put on the CAN bus. While there are opinions on whether or not this is a good thing, the reality is that enough data is gathered on this bus to turn an unmodified modern car into a video game controller with just a little bit of code.

The core of [Scott]’s project is a laptop and a Python program that scrapes information …read more

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Wideband Woes and the Junkbox Miata

As ever, I am fighting a marginally winning battle against my 1991 Mazda MX-5, and this is the story of how I came to install a wideband oxygen sensor in my Japanese thoroughbred. It came about as part of my ongoing project to build myself a viable racecar, and to figure out why my 1990s Japanese economy car engine runs more like a late 1970s Malaise-era boat anchor.

I’ve always considered myself unlucky. My taste for early 90s metal has meant I’ve never known the loving embrace of OBD-2 diagnostics, and I’ve had to make to do with whatever hokey …read more

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