Why Diesels Were About to be Obsolete Anyway

Why Diesels Were About to be Obsolete Anyway
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As Volkswagen reaches a settlement for US owners, something occurred to me. Have you ever had a really great idea in the shower? I haven't. My epiphanies usually come while behind the wheel on some remote stretch of Highway 101 or driving down a Georgia back road on an early Saturday morning. One such flash of brilliance was that I should ask my (then) girlfriend to marry me -- I was in a BMW 528e on Interstate 80 just outside Vacaville, CA. Best decision I ever made.

Last week on one of those Saturday mornings, I had an ah-ha moment while piloting a new 2016 Volkswagen Passat. The Passat is a good-sized sedan with lots of high-end features and Apple CarPlay -- in other words, the perfect car for my personal tastes, regardless of my professional opinion. And that's when it hit me: It's too bad about all the VW diesel issues because I think the diesel-powered Volkswagen TDI cars were about to become irrelevant anyway. In fact, I think all diesel powered passenger cars are about to fade away rather than burn out.

There's no denying that TDI versions of the Jetta, the Passat and the Touareg are excellent vehicles. The diesel engine means lots of low-end power, generally expressed as torque. To the average person, that equals quick acceleration from a dead stop, like from a stoplight. Then there's the excellent fuel economy: By 2015, cars such as the VW Passat TDI were getting estimates of 45 miles per gallon on the highway from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) -- that fuel economy is very close to what hybrids get. The problem was that those excellent diesel engines added cost to the purchase price of the car -- for a Jetta, it was about $2,500.

But here's the kicker: VW's gasoline-powered engines (often called TSI) have been slowly catching up with the diesels in terms of power and fuel economy for years now. Plus, many of us who drive and write about cars for a living still remember how terrible VW's 2.5-liter gasoline engine was, and in our minds, we're still comparing the diesels to those older VWs.

Compared to the non-turbo powered cars, the TDI cars were exotic and amazing, fun and fast, plus they got spectacular fuel-economy.

Jump ahead a few years, and the 2016 Jetta with a 1.4-liter turbocharged engine is good for an EPA-estimated 33 mpg in combined city and highway driving, or 28 mpg city/40 mpg hwy. Plus, the turbocharged versions of cars like the 2016 Volkswagen Passat and Jetta are actually fun to drive, with plenty of power at both low and high speeds. In the Passat, the 1.8-liter turbocharged engine makes 170 horsepower.

But it's not just VW that was having a problem with diesel-powered cars -- the rest of the world is starting to see that maybe diesel engines aren't the miracle we were all led to believe. Diesel powered Peugeots and Hyundais have been leading drivers all over the world down the primrose path for decades, never stopping to think about anything other than CO2 emissions and miles per gallon. Some of the particulate matter that comes from the tailpipe of a diesel powered car isn't all that pleasant. For example, France will slowly begin phasing out diesel cars, and the mayor of London thinks an added tax for diesel vehicles is a good idea because of how much junk comes out of the tailpipe.

And that's kind of my point: The alternative to diesel-powered Volkswagens was under our noses the whole time. The reason none of the Mad Max-ish predictions of a vanishing fuel supply have come true (yet) is that no one was optimistic enough to see just how efficient gasoline-burning internal combustion engines would become. Based on the performance and mpg of the 2016 Passat and Jetta, my guess is that the diesel-powered VWs (and other brands) are going to stop making sense by mid-2017, diesel scandal or not.

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