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If you have stumbled upon this article without following the previous links it will be a bit confusing. Follow this link to the beginning of the story:
Link: "I Drove a SUV That Got 44 MPG!"  Well, you’ve seen the photos. As I previously wrote, the body styling and functionality is very similar to an American SUV. In fact, the manufacture’s website calls it an SUV. So why can’t I buy one like it in the States? American automakers have been fighting CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) increases sighting technology limitations or American’s predilections for larger vehicles like SUVs. Yet, I had to travel to England to drive a SUV that would satisfy most Americans expectations plus get great fuel efficiency. So, how did this automaker manage to produces a SUV that got 44 miles to the gallon of fuel? Was it some high tech modern technology like a hybid drive? Not at all, this vehicle used the oldest combustion engine design. It had a diesel engine. It seems that a third to half of the cars on British roads are diesel powered. Every petrol station has diesel pumps along side their gas pumps. The British drive diesels for their outstanding fuel economy. When Americans think diesel we think of Mack trucks or monster pickups with 8 or 10 cylinders. The British, as well as other European automakers, put diesels in some of their smallest vehicles. It is not unusual to find 4 or 6 cylinder diesel engines under the bonnet of a British car. Why are there no American automakers offering smaller diesel engines in their American styled cars or SUVs? We can find diesel-powered passenger cars offered by Volkswagen or Mercedes but how about GM, Chrysler, or Ford? It seems to me that the wide introduction of diesel engines, with their greater fuel economy, would lift the CAFE averages considerably without a great deal of development costs. The modern diesel engine burns fuel more cleanly and efficiently than in years past. Sure it’s a bit noisier than a typical gas engine, but if that is the only downside to a 40 – 60 MPG sedan or SUV then where’s the problem? The Europeans are decades ahead of the U.S. in the usage of diesel engines. It seems a simple short-term solution to the rising cost of fuel. The manufacturing, transportation and delivery infrastructure of diesel fuel is currently in place. We just need American automakers to manufacture and sell these vehicles. They all have partnerships, are owned by or own European carmakers, who already know the technology. American carmakers have been facing declining sales for the past few years. They could lift their bottom line significantly beyond solvency just by putting diesel engines in their existing sedans and SUVs then promote the idea through ads. Americans would buy out their lots if they knew that could almost double their fuel economy. However, instead of taking the technologically proven road, they are lowering our expectations for significantly higher fuel economy now, by promoting new technologies such as hybrid engines and hydrogen fuel at significantly higher consumer costs somewhere in the distant future. The dream of a reliable, reasonably priced 60 MPH hybrid gas / electric car is a decade or more off and it still relies on gasoline. Even with that, we need to get used to significantly downsized cars and limited travel distances. Why haven’t they pushed a well known technology readily available like diesel? I have some speculation on this. Diesel engines are about 50% more efficient than gasoline engines. If every automobile and truck ran with diesel engines the demand for fuel would be cut by a third. Since about 80% of the oil pumped from the ground goes to making automobile fuel, well you can imagine what that would do to the price of petrol. We could have stretched our oil reserves by many decades if not a century if we sold diesels along side gas engines all these years. However, I don’t think efficiency alone dissuaded American car manufactures from going diesel. American oil and automobile companies have an economic symbiotic relationship. They are both customer and supplier for each other’s products. Automobiles both require fuel and create the demand for fuel. Oil companies have spent many years and much capital horizontally integrating their businesses. They own the entire production stream from oil fields through shipping, refining and retail. They have staked it all on the exploitation of subterranean petroleum from which both gas and diesel fuel is made. However, diesel engines are not solely dependent on petroleum fuel. Rudolph Diesel invented the diesel engine in 1897. His intent was to fuel his engine with refined oils derived from vegetables. That’s right, vegetable oil. People today are discovering that they can run their diesel trucks and cars on various refined vegetable oils with only minor modifications to their engines. They report that diesel engines run on vegetable oils (biodiesel) run cleaner, smoother and less noisy. Biodiesel fueled engines can help reduce our dependency on petroleum or as President Bush says, free us from the oil addiction. If half of our cars had diesel engines, we could look towards our heartland for fuel instead of foreign producers. We could get our fuel from Nebraskan soybeans instead of Saudi oil fields. We would be buying fuel from American farmers not Kuwaiti Sheiks. American soy growers have already found markets for their produce in the European biodiesel market. It would take a small investment, relative of what it takes to capitalize an oil refinery, to begin producing commercial qualities of biodiesel. However, the oil companies and their co-conspirators the auto industries have denied Americans of this possibility. It’s much easer put a few oil rich sheiks in your back pocket than a few thousand midwestern farmers. Oil companies could have a piece of the refinery process, but there is not much to the refining of biodiesel. It’s a simple one step process. People, in fact, do it in their garages. The once mighty oil companies would be relegated to retail and we know there is not much money in that. The existence of big oil and the current world economy for that matter depends on our reliance on petroleum from which gasoline is by far the largest product. British Petroleum is the first big oil company to see the light. Their oil fields have already reached the limit where it is becoming more expensive to pump than it’s worth. They are investing in the refinement of biodiesel from various forms of biomass. The need to secure sources of petroleum was and is the cause for much of the wars and strife throughout the 20th Century to now. With every biodiesel powered automobile sold in the United States, we could be that much closer to the radical downsizing of Big Oil and all of the intrigue, wars, economic destabilization and terrorism it spawns. Oh, I bet by now you’re wondering who made that SUV that averaged 44 miles to the gallon of diesel fuel. Was it a Peugeot or a Vauxhall, or maybe an MG? You didn’t see the Mercedes hood ornament in the photos did you? Click on this link and find out who made this car that I think could revolutionize Americans’ car buying habits in this day of SUVs and high gas prices. Link: "SUV maker"
© Copyright 2006 murf (UN: murf at Writing.Com).
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