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Re: [OM] [ot] for all the car nuts, petrol heads

Subject: Re: [OM] [ot] for all the car nuts, petrol heads
From: Winsor Crosby <wincros@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 7 Jan 2003 09:08:11 -0800
 > Your diesel engine information is about 20 years out of date.  They
 are in production. There is an infrastructure to support them.
 Modern turbo-diesel engines are very competitive in performance to
 gasoline engines and they use much less fuel.
They use much less fuel but like for like they are still light years behind
the any petrol engine of similar size and displacement in refinement and
performance , take a petrol engine of similar capacity and turbo charge it
and the resulting car will leave the turbo desisel version like its in
reverse. Diesels soot production is still approximately a thousand time
higher than a petrol engine and its these particulates that can cause asthma
once the link is proved it will be interesting to see what happens in
california..  as for Gas powered cars the infrastructure is there you just
have to look for it.. LPG has another name.. Propane, I think you will fnd
its fairly easily available but not from a gas station!

Stewart

The energy density of gas is way lower than a liquid fuel impacting mileage and tank size. There is not enough natural gas around to supply cars if there is a massive shift in its use. You are jumping on the propane infrastructure for home heating. It is totally inadequate for a shift to transportation usage. I think the use of dual power LPG/gasoline is a way to deal with driving without running out of fuel. Some of its economies to the user will be lost as it is taxed like gasoline.

Modern diesels are not stinky and slow. Some have already dealt with the soot problem. As for performance they race them in Europe. If you look at performance as efficiency there is no turbo-charged gasoline engine that approaches the turbo diesel. The end market for turbo engines for the two types of engines is different. Turbo is a performance add on for small gasoline engines. On diesels its purpose is average acceleration with great efficiency. It is kind of pointless anyway to compare ultimate performance when people do not buy that kind of car. Most people buy comfortable, middling performance cars and diesel engines provide that with exceptional economy. For instance a VW Golf TDI has better mileage than all but one of the hybrid cars with much better performance and its mileage is substantially better than any gasoline engine with performance equal to or better than most of the high mileage small gasoline engine cars.

I am not a big diesel advocate. I just thought that many of the things you said were true a long time ago. Not now.
--
Winsor Crosby
Long Beach, California


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