Diesel Cars: Fact and Fiction

For carmakers around the world, the failure of the diesel engine in America is a long-running mystery. After all, diesel passenger cars have been a huge hit in Europe, especially over the last decade. Since fuel costs and efficiency have taken centre stage, sales of diesel cars have doubled. At present, nearly fifty percent of all new cars sold in Europe have diesel engines.

But across the Atlantic, the number could not be more different. According to a recent survey, about 95 percent of all passenger cars in the US run on petrol. The only vehicles that have diesel engines in the US are huge commercial trucks.

Why the discrepancy? Well, one of the reasons is that diesel cars have a bad reputation in the States. When they were introduced to the American public in the 1970s, the first diesel cars left much to be desired. It was said that they were noisy, dirty and that they even smelt. And guess what? Those early passengers were right!

But decades of innovation has transformed the modern diesel engine into a much cleaner, quieter and nearly odour-free machine. Unfortunately, most Americans are unaware of this fact, or they simply refuse to accept that diesels have changed. And that is a shame, because there are many advantages to owning a diesel.

For starters, diesel fuel has a much higher density, which means that fuel economy is about 20-30 percent better than petrol. Diesel engines are also much cheaper to repair and maintain than petrol engines because they have fewer moving parts. Lastly, the average diesel car is about 500 pounds cheaper than the average petrol car.