Round One of US Market diesels was the late 70s/early 80s era…ending due primarily to the shoddy durability of the Oldsmobile family of diesels.
The current legal trouble with VW diesels and FIAT/VM Motori diesels (In select Ram Pickups and Jeep Grand Cherokees) “cheating” US emissions tests allowing up to 20x stated emissions levels is liable to scare away customers from genuinely clean, reliable diesels from Mercedes, Cummins, Ford Power Stroke, Duramax, etc.
They have gaining popularity in the light truck market. GM’s 2.8 in the colorado/canyon is doing well. Ford is launching a 3.0 for F-150’s and possibly the Ranger when it returns.
I don’t think they are going away anytime soon.
Personally I don’t think the extra upfront and maintenance costs are worth paying for. I’m always more likely to take a gas option if it’s available.
The diesel cycle is basically at a hard limit with respect to efficiency because of NOx emissions that result from high compression ratios, which is what got VW. Even the newer gas direct injection engines are going to have problems and may require urea injection in the near future to meet emissions standards. As it stands now the only way to absorb the cost of the massive expense of diesel engines, from the engines just being more expensive in general (high pressure injection, beefier blocks, rods, etc) and also the extra emissions control equipment, is to only use them in very high margin vehicles.
WIth technology going the way it is, electrification is likely a better way forward. Spend the extra $3k on batteries and hybridisation instead of diesel.
Fossil fuels are dead for ground transportation. Diesel will probably be the first to collapse, both due to inevitable pollution issues but also because commercial transportation dominates diesel use and that will be the market that most rapidly adopts pure EVs.
There not going away as they have advantages that other fuels/engine/motors don’t, but I do see it as getting more ‘nitched’. Heavy trucking, trains, ships, construction vechicals, large generators or other large powerful machines including farm equipment that need to be powered not near grid power, or use too much power for the grid. Diesel is also better then many fuels for standby, backup reasons such as many ski lifts use diesel as a backup source of power, some still use it as primary too.
However for passenger cars and the like, the automakers are apparently seeing the handwriting on the wall and moving away from diesel as they seem to be up against a limit with them and other fuels seem more promising moving forward.
GM is everyone’s favorite whipping boy for everything, but the decline of diesel in the '80s had more to do with the end of the second oil crisis and the fact that cars were downsized across the board. and that during the '80s gas engine performance started to improve while diesels were still mostly non-turbo, smoky, and slow.
Diesel cars have been a niche market of people who buy diesel VWs because they want a diesel VW, and pretty much no one else. They were people who wanted to feel unique and “tech savvy” because they drove something different. They’ve been replaced by Tesla fans who think they know absolutely everything about the industry.
What current advantages (other than range) do diesels have over EV’s? Even the torque advantage diesels used to have over gas motors is gone because of EV’s.
Diesels never really caught on in North America, but they’re still pretty popular in Europe (and in many military vehicles).
Diesel should be he first to go, it’s a dirty fuel.
diesel’s “torque advantage” was gone when gas engines adopted similar technologies (turbocharging with direct fuel injection.) Diesel engines don’t inherently produce more torque than gas engines; on a per-displacement basis they produce less horsepower for a given torque output leading people to draw incorrect conclusions.
further, because diesels are immune to detonation, they’ve been able to use turbocharging with high boost pressure for decades. Which also leads to the “diesel=torque” myth because people have been comparing turbodiesels to naturally aspirated gas engines. give your gas engine direct injection and strap a fast-spooling turbo on it, and it’ll easily give you as much torque and way more horsepower than a diesel of similar displacement. Just be careful you don’t go lean under load.
the simple fact is that turbocharging is what gets you torque. Turbo boost is based on engine load, and not engine speed like a mechanical supercharger. So a turbo can deliver useful boost at very low engine RPM.
diesel is common in Europe for a few reasons:
they’re more efficient thanks to the Diesel thermodynamic cycle and that they have no throttle to contribute pumping losses at light load
fuel costs in Europe are incredibly high compared to the US, and the increased efficiency means lower operating cost for the owner. oh, and that a turbodiesel will have better drivability than a NA gas engine of the sizes common in European cars
European governments have been subsidizing/promoting diesel adoption as a means to reducing CO2 emissions, but on the other end had rather lax testing standards with giant loopholes leading to increased emissions of trace pollutants. and limp penalties for manufacturers caught bending/breaking the rules.
Despite hyperbole you’ve heard spewing from the mouth of Elon Musk, liquid hydrocarbon fuels are not “dead for ground transportation”, and regardless of advances in electric vehicle technology liquid fuel internal combistion engines are likely to remain a viable market segment for the foreseeable future. This is due in part to limitations on the cost threshold and volume of batteries that can be produced—setting up a lithium ion or lithium polymer manufacturing plant requires hundreds of millions of dollars and several years, and manufacturing rates are limited by the intensive processing required—but alos by the fact that while electric vehicles are an obvious choice for certain applications such as commuting, fleet service, and OTR cargo transportation, there are many applications where the range limitations, mass of a battery pack, and inability to quickly recharge a vehicle make hydrocarbon fuels desirable, particularly behicles that have to operate in remote locations, extreme cold temperatures, and in off-grid applications.
There is also the hard fact that most of the world’s driving population cannot afford to purchase a new vehicle even if total cost of ownership is ostensibly lower, and that there is a massive if sometime ad hoc infrastructure for the distribution of petroleum fuels while electricity in sufficient quantity for transportation is unreliable at best outside the developed world. If “fossil fuels are dead for ground transportation”, so would be Puerto Rico with its months long blackout to most parts of the island. Large scale electric vehicle adoption is also going to require revamping or completely replacing major parts of the electrical power distribution infrastructure in many prts of the world, and especially the United States whose obsolescent and ad hoc collection of loosely affiliated distribution networks and utilities is already stretched thin in many places.
Even when electric vehicles become a viable mainstream choice for people not living in suburbanized industrial nations and making six figure incomes, it is going to take a long time to phase out liquid hydrocabon vehicles even where it makes fi ancial sense to do so, and you can guarantee that the petroleum industry will fight tooth and nail to keep usage alive as long as possible. To that end, it makes sense to continue to invest in biofuel and synfuel technologies which can replace petroleum distiallates with a lower total cycle carbon footprint and in applications which only require conversion of existing vehicles, e.g. methanol, dimethyl ether, gas-to-liquid synfuels, 2nd generation FAME, et cetera. We’ll still need such fuels for commercial aviation and space transportation regardless, where electric vehicles are never going to be viable without some radical advances in energy storage technology.
I think diesel for passenger cars in the U.S. is going away because it’s expensive to make them emissions compliant and in the U.S., they don’t offer any worthwhile performance advantages over gas cars. Some new car buyers believe that diesel cars are more durable but there are very few new car buyers who want to keep their car for 20 years in any event. People who buy one car every 20 years are also not the most desirable customers for car manufacturers to court.
Diesel cars get better fuel mileage but in the U.S., the higher cost of diesel fuel offsets the advantage and on a cost per mile basis, it’s basically a wash. When you consider that diesel cars cost thousands of dollars more than comparable gas cars to purchase, the time value of money means that most new car buyers will never earn back enough in fuel savings to justify buying a diesel.
Diesel cars have more torque but they aren’t any quicker than gas cars. Looking back at old reviews of the Volkswagen Jetta, the cheapest Jetta had the 2.5L gas engine and accelerated exactly as quickly as the diesel version. The diesel version cost 20% more money though.
Diesel engines also have a bad reputation as polluting. Having spent plenty of time in European cities where “clean diesel” cars dominate, my impression is that they really contribute a lot to air pollution. The news of widespread diesel emissions cheating just confirmed my impression.
Around the world, there are numerous regulatory efforts to deemphasize diesel cars. Some cities are banning diesel cars from their downtowns. Some jurisdictions want to ban fossil fuel cars altogether in favor of electrics. Why would a carmaker want to spend a ton of money further developing dead-end diesel cars?
Heavy truck diesels will remain for the foreseeable future. If those trucks’ wheels aren’t turnin’, they ain’t earnin’. The best way to keep them turning is with diesel engines that offer amazing range with long maintenance intervals. Electric trucks don’t have the range to run over 800 miles per day. If you have to hot-swap the batteries at the halfway, you lose time to do the swap and you leave 70% of the truck’s cost by the side of the road slowly recharging. I think that the higher capital investment for electric trucks, charging infrastructure, and swappable batteries means that they won’t be cost-competitive with diesel heavy trucks for a while. I think we may have some self-driving diesel trucks before we have largely replaced the diesel trucks with electric ones.
The biggest advantage that diesels have over gasoline is that it’s a lot easier to make practical diesel biofuel. But I’m not holding my breath for the US to realize that-- Here, “biofuel” is too tied up in junk ethanol.
no they don’t. one thing I enjoy pointing out is that every single 2.0 liter DI gas turbo engine on the market has more torque and a lot more horsepower than VW’s 2.0 TDI.
With OTR transportation you don’t need to “hot swap” battery packs because the cargo is already separated from the the motive system; you just have to switch tractors, which is a fifteen minute operation that is amenible to automation. There is a significant capital investment but the savings in reduction of fuel costs (and assurance that the cost of electricity will be controlled, such that transportation companies don’t lose money on existing contracts with fuel costs go through the roof), maintenance, and the inherent efficiencies in electric vehicles offset the higher initial costs which will be seen immediately and over the life of the vehicle. And yes, by a modest scaling of the size of the rig, an 800 mile range is achievable, particularly on an autonomous vehicle where the passenger compartment can be reduced to just enough space for a service operator if necessary instead of a full bench and sleeping compartment.
Battery electric rigs are not going to be popular with the owner-operator segment of the market, but that has been shrinking and will likely disappear entirely once autonomous OTR vehicles become viable for obvious reasons. Trucking is dominated by the five major players nationwide and a handful of regional companies or subsidiaries in each region, and the bulk of their travel is across the Interstate Highway System, so the deployment of charging infrastructure is not as extensive as it would need to be for commuter applications (if commuters were not charging at home or work stations). Companies within the direct-to-consumer logistics segments such as UPS and FedEx have already converted a significant amount of their local delivery fleet to eletric vehicles, so the savings potential is already well demonstrated.
It may be “easier” in terms of the energy going into the product and the amount of processing, but scaleability of biofuels has always been a serious limitation. And there are two serious net ecological negatives to biofuel replacement; the consumption of fresh potable water and synthetized ammonia to grow intensively cultivated grain-based fuels, both of which have significant future implications. As far as synfuels go, methonal and dimethyl ether (DME) are technically the best options, and also can be used in retrofitted or redesigned Otto-cycle and Diesel-cycle engines with some fairly minor modifications, or can be mixed with petrofuels for reductions in costs and emissions.
Proven longevity/durability even abusable to a good degree and fast refueling. But range is a very important factor.
Many diesel locomotives are diesel electric, where the diesel engine powers a generator which in turn powers a electric motor to turn the wheels. So the range is really a key issue to keep them on the road/rail/whatever.
Another factor is that there are many people who work on diesel so easy to get repaired, EV repair is still a niche. Though this could change.
So rather than switching the battery pack that is perhaps 70% of the cost of the tractor, they should switch the whole tractor? Now they need two electric trucks to do the work of one diesel truck. I don’t see how that is better. Furthermore, shipping companies can only stage their electric tractors in certain locations for recharging, which means they lose a lot of flexibility in routing trucks through bad weather or highway disruptions. I think we will have a lot of electric big rigs someday but I don’t see them completely displacing long-haul diesel trucks anytime soon.
Electric trucks are likely to appeal to company-owned fleets at first, e.g. Wal*Mart and the like who do their own distribution. That way you just have fully charged tractors waiting at each endpoint; driver pulls in, detaches the trailer for unloading, then hops into another (fully charged) tractor with another trailer for the next run.
For owner-operators and small fleet ops it doesn’t make any sense. For major trucking companies that maintain a large fleet of trucks and can shuffle them around to optimize logistics the tradeoff between the capital investment in more trucks and the staging infrastructure versus immediate reductions in fuel and maintenance costs isn’t even debatable, especially with uncertainties in the cost increased of fuel versus the fungibility of electrical power production. And while it may take “two electric trucks to do the work of one diesel truck”, the real limitation has always been the time that operators can actually spend on the road. Once autonomous piloting systems become viable for OTR applications—and this is an easier subset of the overall problem of driving in cities or suburban non-highway roads—being able to keep electric trucks in near-constant operation between charging cycles is key to maximizing profit margins.
Chevy has had a diesel version of the Cruze since 2014 and released a diesel version of the Equinox this year. Supposedly, Mazda is supposed to release a diesel version of their CX-5 crossover this year, but there haven’t been many updates on it since some initial buzz a year or so ago. So it seems we’re seeing at least a little exploration outside the typical diesel market of big trucks and Euro automakers.
While I was happy to give it back after the fraud was discovered, and I am not a VW fan at all, the primary reason I owned a 6-speed Diesel Jetta was the range, and the ability to get to super remote places fast and with a minimum number of fuel stops.
They are dead in passenger cars in the US, but I could make it from Seattle, Wa to Twin Falls, ID without stopping for fuel, while cresting passes like Snoqualmie and Cabbage Hill without even downshifting from 6th gear, without really stressing the car and being at or slightly above the speed limit.
This was just a side effect of a car having a tank sized for a less dense fuel, but I must point out that the people who don’t see a difference in the HP/Torque specs are missing the flatness of the curve in a modern diesel.
For most people this wouldn’t matter at all to be honest, as bladders and typical travel needs typically don’t match this unique advantage, but with the exception of traffic a hybrid doesn’t really gain a huge advantage on this need, (which I owned) because of the lack of opportunity for capturing energy during breaking etc…
For road trips I think that was still the best car I ever owned.
no we aren’t. GTDI engines can be (and typically are) tuned for very flat torque curves. example.
when you have high-pressure low lag turbocharging (which diesels have had since forever) you can pretty much shape your torque curve however you wish (within reason.)
edited to add: the hardest part about explaining this is that people just assume that things “everyone knows” are automatically correct. While the reason they believe something is because they heard that “everyone knows it.”
