In Britain I think it’s fair to say that we generally enjoy complaining about things.
I drive a Mercedes Vito van with a 3.0 diesel engine and it used to cost me about £75 to fill it up from empty. It wasn’t exactly cheap, but at least it was consistent. At the height of fuel price increases it once cost me £102 to fill up the tank and I remember thinking it really couldn’t get any worse. This morning I refilled and realized it was £1.05 a litre. To make me even happier they were even offering a free Cadbury’s Twirl with every coffee (I declined for dietary reasons) and I just paid my £77 feeling not too ripped off.
However, my joy was short-lived when I realized that unleaded petrol was priced at just £0.89 a litre. That’s a saving of 16p a liter or 72p a gallon! That’s an extraordinary price difference, and it’s no wonder diesel vehicle sales are suffering right now. You would have to drive a lot of miles to justify any savings, as many modern gasoline engines are very economical. Assuming your diesel car averages 50mpg then £45 worth of fuel at £1.05 per liter should get you 471 miles. The same amount of petrol at £0.89 a litre, in a car averaging 40mpg, would give you 445 miles. With a typical diesel car usually costing at least £500 more than an equivalent petrol-powered used model to buy, you’d need to drive more than 20,000 miles a year before you see justifiable savings.
Rudolph Diesel first demonstrated the engine that would immortalize his name, at the World’s Fair in Paris in 1900. His engine was unique in that it used the heat generated by compressing air to ignite fuel, which was injected at the end of compression. stroke. At the time, it was much more efficient than a steam engine, and even ran on peanut oil, the modern version of which is Bio Diesel. It took until 1936 before a diesel engine was fitted to a production car, and that Mercedes 260D, despite having a top speed of around 55mph, was one of the most important cars ever made.
Unfortunately, Rudolph Diesel never got to see or drive a car equipped with his revolutionary engine. On September 29, 1913, while en route to a conference in London aboard the steamer ‘Dresden’, he disappeared overboard sometime after dinner and was never seen alive again. His body was found by the crew of a Dutch ship a few days later, and his son identified him from the personal belongings they found on him.
The enormous torque and heavy weight of these early engines meant that they were better suited for use in ships, tractors, trains and buses than in automobiles, but as technology progressed engines were vastly improved, and by the mid-1990s By the 1980s, diesel-powered cars were quite common in ‘ordinary’ cars (and of course, Taxis). However, the executive and luxury car market was left with the smoother, quieter and more powerful gasoline engine. Just 25 years ago, the idea of a noisy, smoking old diesel engine in an executive car was virtually unheard of.
Smoking and rattling diesel engines were totally out of place with the image of what constituted a ‘luxury car’ and as a result most had a 6 or 8 cylinder petrol engine (or a V12 in Jaguar’s case). ). Most of these struggled to top 20 mpg (or 12 mpg if you had an older Range Rover or Jaguar V12), but were well-suited to quiet, high-speed cruising. Economics was not that important and the words ‘carbon footprint’ only existed in the English language in relation to a child stepping in the ashes of a barbecue and walking on the cream carpet!
It was the development of the powerful and efficient turbocharged and intercooled engine that made diesel power a viable alternative to a large gasoline engine. The 1995 W210 Mercedes Benz E300 TD was one of the first truly outstanding executive cars, which was actually better than the 3.0 gas equivalent model. I once drove a 1998 E300TD from Stuttgart to Calais in a day, and it averaged almost 40 mpg despite a few 130 MPH Autobahn stretches. I knew then that diesel power was the future of executive cars, and since then they’ve improved so much that, compared to the latest diesel BMW 530, Mercedes looks positively agricultural.
Some of today’s best executive cars and SUVs are powered by diesel engines and some are simply spectacular. The 4.0 TDi fitted to the Audi A8 is an absolute monster, just like the 5.0 TDi fitted to the Volkswagen Phaeton and Touareg. BMW has the 535 Diesel which isn’t far behind the M5’s gasoline V10 in terms of performance, but it can average nearly 40 mpg in a race. More notable is the fact that the 24-hour race of Le Mans in 2008 was won by a diesel-powered Audi R10 powered by a 5.5-litre V12 turbodiesel engine. After completing 381 laps it was still going strong and I will never forget the noise it made as it made its way down the track. While camped out in a muddy field about 100 yards from Arnage corner, the damn things kept me awake for most of the night!
I can’t help but wonder what Mr. Diesel would have thought of the success of his proprietary engine design and how terrified he would be if he had to take a quick turn behind the wheel of an Audi A8 4.0 TDi. However, I bet he would have a good heavenly laugh when he saw someone fill one up with unleaded gas by mistake! Although unleaded petrol may cost just 89p a litre, the damage it can cause to a modern common rail diesel injection system can cost thousands of dollars to repair! Still, it keeps breakdown services (and us) busy draining tanks and changing filters.