I don’t quite understand or even know the motivation behind Mazda’s decision to introduce a diesel variant of the CX-60 SUV for the UK because I don’t even think Mazda understand what they are doing. Mazda is calling its new 3.3-litre straight-six diesel engine “clean” which is not too dissimilar to the time when President Donald Trump referred to American fossil fuels as “clean coal”. Nobody with a scintilla of common sense believed Donald Trump then, so why should I believe Mazda now when they gaslight along the same lines as Trump?
But Mazda further continues to rubber-stamp the lunacy, they go on to say that the e-Skyactive D Diesel engine features an all-new “clean burn” combustion technology, its the “cleanest diesel engine in the world”… Man, they come right out of a comic book. Does Mazda honestly think the motoring journalist community is thick enough to believe this pile of bile? of course not.
So Mazda, armed with its PR war chest, decided to buy the opinion of motoring journalists by sending them on an all-expenses paid trip to an exotic location to road-test the CX-60. And they bragged about it on Twitter. In reality, it’s all clean-burn bullshit. Mazda is gaslighting and misinforming right in your face operating openly in plain sight without any pushback.
It’s very easy to buy the media because journalism does not exist anymore. The trained journalists go to journalism school to learn how to lie. And when Mazda propagates a myth such as “clean burn diesel” there is an endless line of motoring journalists jetting back from an all-expense paid Mazda press launch only too willing to sow the seeds of a well-orchestrated PR campaign.
For automotive manufacturers, motoring journalists are at the top of the data-driven performance marketing funnel. But you don’t need data-driven metrics to see the stupidity of “clean burn” diesel engines because no fossil fuel can ever deliver a clean burn, it is theoretically and technically impossible.
So let’s laugh it off and live it up, let’s ignore the fact that sales of new diesel cars continue to fall in the UK. Mazda can always remind the savvy car-buying punter that the deck chairs remain on the Titanic and that the small iceberg in the distance poses no threat at all.