Difficult to compare because we pay tax separately on diesel in New Zealand. This means that farm vehicles can have diesel without paying a road tax for roads they aren’t using. I think when I’ve done the sums in the past the tax inclusive fuel cost of the Focus and Outback are very similar.
Hunh. I know a guy who did that, together with one of his sons. I wonder if we know the same people … ? Was the car a Malibu wagon?
No, Oldsmobile Sedan. Big car, ton of work.
Ah. Thanks. Would have been one of those amusing “small world” things if this had been the same father-son team.
I drive gasoline cars but also buy diesel fuel for a tractor. I can’t think of a single filling station around me that does not sell diesel. Granted, there are more gasoline pumps than diesel pumps at a typical filling station. But the diesel pump is usually not in use whereas sometimes all the gasoline pumps are.
A big reason for some to favor diesel is that it’s less perishable than gasoline. In gasoline there are very volatile components that may evaporate away, and other changes.
Diesels use glow plugs to start, but not because they’re especially difficult to start in the cold. Glow plugs play a role fairly similar to spark plugs in a gasoline engine, during starting. The bigger difference is that once the engine is warm, glow plugs are no longer needed, whereas spark plugs are needed constantly. Since the high voltage system for firing spark plugs is somewhat fragile and finicky, they represent a reliability problem that diesels don’t have. Glow plugs are just little heating elements that run directly off battery power. And, they’re not warming up the engine – they just provide a hot point in the cylinder to get the combustion to start when the cylinder overall is too cool to do that.
I’ve always wondered about the argument that diesel engines are more reliable because they have heavier construction. There’s a kind of circular flaw in that argument. The heavier construction is required because of the bigger pressures involved. That is, you can’t build a diesel as lightly as you can build a gasoline engine, because it would be so unreliable; maybe it would fall apart the first time you tried to run it, or at best it wouldn’t work for very long. So the issue becomes whether diesels are more over designed for their purpose, relative to how over designed gasoline engines are.
I don’t think that I’ve ever seen a gas station that doesn’t have at least one pump that offers diesel. Usually more. They are rarely their own individual pump, but combined with the regular ones. Look for a differently colored handle than the rest of the pumps.
They don’t actually deploy with everything they will ever need. There are constant convoys bringing them supplies. Sure, they are not relying on local infrastructure, but they are relying on logistics and supply lines.
Restaurants don’t pay to have their oil removed, they actually get paid for it. It’s not a whole lot, but it was something. It depends on a number of factors, but it was usually worth between $0.50 and $1.50 a gallon.
Some managers could be talked into letting people take it, as they didn’t know it was worth anything, but most would not. Many people who used fryer oil to run their cars would actually steal it. The last restaurant I worked at actually had a padlock on their dumpster area specifically for that reason.
Keep in mind that fryer oil is around $8 a gallon. It’s never been “free”.
You are probably going to want to use a filter made for fryer oil. The stuff you can’t see and that will pass through a colander or chinois is going to end up messing your engine up.
ETA: and it’s also illegal, as you are not paying tax on that fuel.
No need for useless anecdotes about everyone’s local stations. Punching
what percent of gas stations sell diesel
into Google returns sites saying it’s about half. Up from a third in the 90s. Obviously YMMV based on location.
Prices can be found at eia.gov
Which in turn is an incentive to have about every major engine system they have run on the same family of fuels.
My dad once owned an '84 Chevy wagon with the 5.7L diesel. According to him, GM had worked out the bugs by then but nobody cared.
I’ve owned two diesel cars, a 1985 VW, and then many years later my current car, a 2016 Jeep Grand Cherokee.
Finding diesel in the 1980s was a challenge. When road tripping, when my tank got down to about 50 miles left I had to find a gas station with diesel. Especially late at night in rural small town America you could get stranded, although that never happened.
These days diesel is more common but it’s not everywhere. But with an app like Gas Buddy I can find it easily.
About fuel economy and performance? My Grand Cherokee performs decently. The best tankful I ever got was at 35 MPG. With the big tank I was able to go 835 (!) miles.
And those turbines in the Abrams can run on damn near anything, with only minor adjustments. They usually run on JP8, because that’s what the supply lines are bringing, but if you do run into some sort of logistical snafu where you have to rely on scavenged local fuels, they’ll still work. As I understand it, that flexibility is the main reason for the use of turbines: The military likes having contingency plans in place in case everything goes wrong, because it’s inherent in the nature of a military that there’s someone trying to make everything go wrong for you.
My 1999 Jeep Cherokee Sport with a 4.0 l straight six with around 250,000 miles on it is lucky to get 19 mpg – and that’s if I keep it down to 65 mph or less. I drove it yesterday in the snow, so I used 4WD. We’d been driving it a little before, and my wife has a heavy foot; so the average fuel consumption showed 13.4 mpg. By the time I finished my outing, it was up to 13.7 mpg.
Damn straight! Dad bought a brand new '79 VW Rabbit diesel in NYC when his Fiat Spider died practically right outside the dealer. There was no place to buy diesel in our bit of suburbia; nearest place was a truck stop off I-84, second exit across the Connecticut state line.
That little car had over 750,000 miles on it when he finally sold it to a coworker, who he taught to drive in it. I had also learned how to drive with a manual transmission in that car.
I love that straight six engine of yours. A solid runner.
For my diesel mpg, that tankful was by far the best ever. With my daily driving I get 20-25 mpg. Still not bad for the JGC.
That is why I got the diesel engine. I plan (hope) to keep mine for several hundreds of thousands of miles. I have only 116,000 now.
For me, diesel engines have two key features:
(a) lower revving (with higher torque), so the pistons travel much less per mile which should mean a longer lasting engine
(b) they are built stronger because the compression is higher
The notion that “Diesels are more reliable” probably has its roots in the era when gasoline-engined cars had carburettors, and, more importantly, had moving ignition parts like breaker points and mechanical distributors that wore out regularly and also were prone to failure. Also, because of imprecise fuel metering, spark plugs wore out a lot earlier and were a lot more prone to failure to fire.
Of course all of that is outdated. Breaker points went away from the early to mid '70s onward. Fuel injection was common from the mid '80s onward and had completely supplanted carburettors by the early '90s. And mechanical distributors were gone by the turn of the millennium.
To answer the OP, diesel engines have less moving parts than gasoline engines, so it theory, they should be more reliable. Also more efficient.
In practice, it probably depends on how much recent design & research has gone into the respective engines. That’s fairly constantly shifting. There are more cars with gas engines, but nearly all trucks are diesel. And truck buyers are concerned with those numbers, car buyers are very influenced by styling.
For military vehicles, it’s probably the points already mentioned: logistics simplicity of one-fuel, plus the flexibility of using other fuels in an emergency that make the difference.
I always had read that was a fringe benefit, and the real advantage was that the turbines are considerably better at lower speeds- i.e. the tanks powered by them accelerate much faster than diesels, making them more mobile and therefore survivable.
In addition, they don’t sound the same as a diesel, don’t smoke like crazy on startup, and don’t need a warmup period like diesels do, all of which are important on the battlefield.