Mazda revealed two concepts at the Japan Mobility Show 2025 that offer a peek at the brand’s potential future styling and the technology that may lie beneath. Mazda President and CEO Masahiro Moro said the automaker "envisions a future where the more kilometers you drive, the more you help reduce CO2."
The cars are called the Vision X-Coupe and Vision X-Compact, with the "X" pronounced as “cross." But, there's much more to them than just their styling.
The coupe, which is longer than the Mazda6 and actually has four doors, features a plug-in hybrid system with a two-rotor rotary engine, which can run on carbon-neutral fuel made from microalgae. It produces 503 horsepower and can travel up to 99 miles on electricity alone, which expands to nearly 500 miles with the combustion engine.
According to the automaker, as microalgae grow, they capture CO2 and store oil in their cells. Mazda can then extract that oil and refine it into carbon-neutral fuel. The company says it successfully produced over a liter of fuel from an 11,000-liter culture tank in about two weeks. The byproduct can then be used to make food products or organic fertilizer.
The automaker is also working on "Mazda Mobile Carbon Capture," which it says will pull CO2 directly from the exhaust. The tech will make its debut next month in a super endurance race with the Mazda 55.
The other concept, the Mazda Vision X-Compact, looks like the athletic version of the Mazda2. The X-Compact is "designed to deepen the bond between people and cars through the infusion of human sensory digital model and empathic AI" and includes the brand’s "Human Body Sensing Model."
The car can respond to your emotions, but it goes beyond just picking the perfect playlist. The car can prompt the driver to take a fun back road instead of the highway or warn you of a car hiding in the blind spot.
The Designs
The Vision X-Coupe looks stunning in its silver paint, featuring an evolution of the brand’s Kodo design language. The concave front looks familiar yet aggressive, with the LEDs extending up from the gaping lower grille toward the headlights. At the back, it has a stylized rear window and taillights that look embedded in the body.
Inside, the four-door coupe has white seats, a green cabin, and brown accents, three round instrument gauges, and a massive screen tucked into the dash. It has a simple steering wheel with just a few controls and an elegant steering column branded “Mazda Vision X-Coupe.” Between the front seats is a simple round shifter that includes a manual mode, and Mazda even styled the seat belt buckles.
The Mazda Vision X-Compact is a tiny five-door hatch with super-short overhangs and a wide stance. It features the same front-end styling, with vertical LEDs extending from the lower grille opening to the thin headlights. It also features similar taillights that poke through, looking like they are behind the body.
Inside, the hatch features a simple three-spoke, flat-bottom steering wheel with only a pair of buttons. It sits in front of a large, round speedometer and nothing else. There’s no big digital instrument cluster, and the car even lacks an infotainment display.
Instead, it has a phone mount next to the gauge cluster. There isn’t a large infotainment screen on the dashboard nor a gratuitous number of buttons. It’s a clean, simple design, and if we can’t have buttons, at least we can use our phone.
For now, the two cars are just concepts, but we hope to see some of their styling cues on future models soon. Or Mazda could just build both—we’d be happy with that, too.
Mazda Vision X-Coupe and X-Compact Concepts
Source: Mazda
