Post
by DerGolgo » Sat Feb 23, 2013 8:57 am
Fuel was always a bit more expensive over here, not least because of taxes. People also had slightly less purchasing power at their disposal than you 'mericans. Fuel economy was thus always a bit more important. Diesel engines are, by their nature, a little more fuel efficient than petrol engines, and I think I also read someplace that diesel was also slightly easier to refine, hence a bit cheaper to begin with. So folk who needed low running cost, no matter what, and didn't much care about performance, commercial and municipal operators, public transit, they'd prefer a diesel, since always. With the economy effectively running on diesel, it got massive tax breaks and was thus, in the end, significantly cheaper at the pump, so this generated even more demand. on top of which, agricultural users got a complete tax exemption for their diesel fuel - I don't think I ever even heard of a petrol powered tractor over here. Those tax breaks are also why their diesel is a different color, so the cops can tell when farmer Joe has filled his Merc D model up with offroad tractor juice, which is tax fraud (not that anyone ever checks, though).
With all of that demand, and how, in my understanding, diesel is a cheaper proposition for manufacturers, not just because of any ease in refining, but being less volatile than gasoline and thus being easier to handle, they could offer it a lot cheaper - and with the competition of a market economy (or what passes for that with the petrol station cartels), prices for diesel got low. People would see how folk with diesel cars paid a lot less at the pump, and to add insult to injury, got much better fuel economy, also ... and wanted diesel cars of their own. What's good enough for a taxi is good enough, period!
Manufacturers thus would offer diesel models wherever they thought they might sell some...which turned out to be any part of the market except perhaps sports-cars. You could get cars like an Audi convertible with a diesel, though ... and had they not worried about their brand image, I'm sure Porsche would have managed to sell a few diesel models. Before turbochargers and common rail injection and all of these tricks came along, people would accept a quite significant trade-off in performance for quite significantly lower running costs. In the passenger car market, the first inroads were with the Mercedes models the taxi drivers would come to love, of course. As technology developed, and the fuel economy advantages grew, while the performance disadvantages disappeared pretty much entirely, more people would buy more diesel cars, more diesel would get sold at the pump, so much so that they eventually started to offer two different types of diesel. One for big trucks and buses, one for passenger cars. Different taxation also, I think, and different size nozzles at the pump to make sure you can't put the truck diesel into a passenger car. A whole diesel culture developed, so even when most of the tax breaks for diesel were struck off the books in recent years, the huge demand and competition that went with that would keep prices low.
Diesel got a bad rep in the last decade, though. Particulate emissions got the governments dragged through the courts, and now every car needs a little sticker - red, yellow, or green, depending on how much particulate matter comes out the rear. At autobahn exits, where roads lead into built up areas, sometimes around entire conurbations, there are traffic signs which indicate who may enter. In many larger cities, red or even yellow stickers? You may not drive past this sign. Older diesels have red stickers, even models only a few years old often have yellow ones. Not even vintage cars with "historic" plates are exempt, from what I understand. Since citizens can now sue the authorities if particulate levels exceed EU standards, where those particulates come from is irrelevant. Diesel has gotten slightly less popular because of that and the running-cost advantages being reduced with the taxes having gone up.
Milage-monsters, fuel-economy-geeks and penny-pinchers tend to swing towards LPG these days, it's available at more and more gas stations. I think I read something about a government project to ensure that LPG selling stations are never more than so-and-so many miles away from one another, so you don't get stuck in the sticks with an empty tank. Retrofitting a car for LPG is cheaper than buying one of the newest, green-sticker diesel cars, too. And it's the cheapest fuel at the pump by quite a margin (or so I hear, the comparison isn't quite as simple as with petrol and diesel). As it once was with diesel, most models from most manufacturers are now available in at least one LPG variant, from compacts to luxury sedans. Makes sense, if you can retrofit an existing diesel or petrol engine for LPG, adapting a design straight out of the factory wouldn't be too complicated.
So it's becoming the go-juice of choice for taxis and other people who need to drive for a living, like contractors and delivery drivers. Even many public-transport buses now run it. I wouldn't exactly bet on it, but I get a feeling that, especially if electric cars become more common and gas stations have to deal with shrinking demand for their product, we may see the day that diesel becomes the specialty product LPG was a decade ago, and diesel drivers have to plan their cross-country routes based on where they can fill up. We may see things going that way within the decade, if there are a breakthrough or three in battery technology, or at least a drop in battery prices.
If there were absolutely anything to be afraid of, don't you think I would have worn pants?
I said I have a big stick.
) Yet.
