Needed to ask this, after watching this episode of Top Gear, in which they reviewed the Toyota Prius (2nd-gen).
Basically, the Prius was utterly destroyed by their very cruel, scathing jokes… (The Prius is(was?) my dream car now, but it isn’t available where I stay.)
(people in the US may not be familiar, Top Gear is probably the most entertaining car-review TV show on earth. it’s brit. you can download episodes on p2p)
According to the show, the Prius is slow, poorly-built and has worse mileage than a VW Lupo (a diesel, non-hybrid car).
I don’t know how large a VW Lupo is though… whether it is in the same size class as the 2nd-gen Prius.
Q: How do modern diesel engines compare to modern petrol (“gas” in US-speak) engines in terms of fuel economy and in terms of pollutants per unit distance? Of course the comparison should be between vehicles of similar size and performance.
It’s possible that diesels go further per unit volume of fuel, and yet they release more pollutants per unit distance, ya?
And what about distance per $-worth of fuel?
I checked Wikip, and it didn’t find direct answers… I did learn that diesel contains slightly less energy than petrol though, 45.3 MJ/kg versus 45.8 MJ/kg for petrol.
It’s my understanding that diesel has lower gasseous emissions but higher particulate emissions.
Not sure about cost per mile in UK, but in many parts of europe I know that diesel is cheaper because it’s taxed differently. You know the miles/gal for the prius and for non-hybrid cars. Take the price per gallon for each fuel type and divide it by the miles per gallon and you’ll get the cost per mile.
The problem with diesels, at least in the U.S. is that in their current usage they won’t meet the stricter emissions standards coming up in 2008. It’s not their particulate emissions, that’s been helped tremendously by the introduction of advanced common rail injection. This will be alleviated somewhat by the introduction of low sulphur diesel but the problem in nitrous oxides (NOx). The other problem is that diesel fuel actually costs more in this country than regular gas. The last time I looked, about 15 cents a gallon more. So you pay more for the diesel engine, and then pay more for the fuel. That’s why there were only about fifty thousand diesel vehicles sold here last year, or about 1/2 of 1 percent of the market.
I don’t know about the VW models, but my dad (who works for DaimlerChrysler) brought over one of the euro-spec deisel Jeep Libertys a few weeks ago. We took it out for a ride. Other than at idle, you won’t notice the typical “deisel” noise, but let me tell you…it STINKS.
As in, if you’re at a stoplight, or waiting in the drive-thru, or whatever, and you don’t have the fan controls set to recirc the cabin air, you will get the awful smell of diesel creeping into the car very quickly. IF this is the case with other diesel-mobiles, that will be the major hurdle in the US market.