Vin Diesel. Diesel 10. Clean diesel.
Add comment July 7th, 2009
When I hear the word “diesel,” I tend to think about the actor or the snarly train on “Thomas the Tank Engine.”
But it’s been poppping up lately as a greener car option, particularly from Volkswagen (someone thinks it’s fun to drive; it also won an award) and other European automakers … as well as an Indian one.
The TDI, as VW calls its diesel engines, is popular with Jetta buyers and accounts for the majority of Jetta wagon sales. Those cars are rated by the EPA at 29 miles per gallon in the city and 40 on the highway, and in our real-world around-town driving, the cars have typically returned fuel economy in the upper 30s. This is in line with results by AMCI Testing, an Oceanside, Calif., company that recorded 38 mpg in city driving and 44 mpg highway for the Jetta TDI.
The best explanation of this phenomenom I found from Popular Mechanics:
Most Americans have a bad impression of diesel cars. We think of them as loud, hard to start and foul-smelling. We sneer at them for lacking the get-up-and-go of their gasoline-powered cousins. And we dislike them for their perceived environmental sins, chiefly the polluting brew of sulfur and nitrogen compounds that they emit into the atmosphere. All those complaints were fair a generation ago, when the twin energy crises of the 1970s propelled diesels into national popularity and kept them there for a decade. Back then, many drivers ignored diesel’s faults, or were unaware of them, because diesel cars ran 30 percent farther on a gallon of fuel than similar gasoline-powered cars. It felt savvy to buy a diesel, even daring. Then fuel prices dropped in the mid-1980s, and drivers abandoned their clattering, odoriferous fuel sippers. They went back to gasoline.
Today, diesel powertrains are on the map again, for both car manufacturers and efficiency-minded drivers. The technology could be here to stay, even if fuel prices (improbably) decline. The new cars run as well as their gasoline-powered competitors. And as for the emissions problems of the past—well, the dirty bird of fossil fuels isn’t so dirty anymore.
