- This topic has 45 replies, 30 voices, and was last updated 6 years ago by squirrelking.
-
New Diesel engines
-
Inbred456Free Member
There has been some research recently into some of the smaller turbo petrols from Nissan/Renault and the real world NOx emissions were as bad or worse than a modern euro6 diesel. I’ve just bought a used Seat Leon ST FR 2015 with just 14K miles on it for 12K. It was over 25K with various options. There are some serious bargains out there at the moment. It’s probably the last diesel I will buy but we may as well benefit from a lot of miss information and scare mongering. If you do the miles diesel is still the better choice. If I can I walk and cycle and we use my wife’s Fabia Tsi for short local trips (38mpg if we are lucky compared to 55mpg in the Seat.)
SandwichFull MemberI’ve just got up after a night shift and IT’S THE FIRST SHORTS DAY OF THE YEAR!!! YES!!!!!!!
Not for those of us commuting at 8am it wasn’t, barely 3/4 weather.
Anyhoo back to the OP.
surferFree MemberI still have an Alfa Mito Diesel (Mrs Surfer drives the C class most of the time) which I bought when I was driving 100 miles per day. Changed jobs now and the commute is 10 each way, stop and start. I would love to change for either an electric or small hybrid but the costs (loss on mine and purchase of new/used) are very high. The Alfa still returns 50+ on short journeys. Guess I will keep it until depreciated.
CountZeroFull MemberAnother recent hint from Mazda seems to indicate they’re bringing back the rotary engine. They’ve been saying that their interest in the engine hasn’t disappeared, but time wasn’t right, but it seems it’ll be used as part of a hybrid system, a small, single rotor, horizontally mounted rotary engine used purely as a generator to supply power to the electric motors driving the car.
Another idea I saw a while back, mooted by Jaguar, was a four-motor electric car, with a pair of those tiny jet engines or gas turbines again just acting as generators for the electric motors, rather like modern warships.
The batteries may not need to be quite so big and heavy, as there is a constant source of power to the electric motors, and gas turbines will run on pretty much anything that’ll burn, paraffin/kerosene, turps, petrol…
EdukatorFree MemberEven the latest E diesels are filthy polluting things for two reasons:
The really harmfull particles go straight through the filter which isn’t fine enough to stop them. NOX emmisions in real use are often tens or hundreds of times over the limit because cars with absorber technology NOX reduction saturate in town use and never reach the conditions for a burn so end up producing as much NOX as a car with no NOX absober. The vast majority of E6 diesels produce more NOX than the limits in reals use. Up to 14 times more. Only a handful meet limits in real use.
In real use diesels produce much higher CO than in tests. This doesn’t surprise, but what might surprise is that petrol car don’t produce so much more. People tend to equate MPG with CO2 but forget that diesel is much more energy dense than petrol and much more dense in carbon too. So you should really be adding 20% or so your diesel consumption to compare with petrol – the tax levy should also take into account that you get more energy in a litre IMO.
AT present a plug-in petrol hybrid no bigger or heavier than you need is the way to pollute as little as possible locally and no more in terms of CO in real use globally, unless there’s and electric car to meet your needs.
squirrelkingFree MemberUnless of course you want to do something silly like towing or drive the miles to get a diesel up to temperature.
As a man more educated on the subject than any of us says:
Professor Graham Hargrave, one of the study’s leaders, says that NOx is only the first step. “NOx is serious,” he said, “but it’s really a point-source problem. It only matters in a tiny minority of locations. Solve it and you can get on with reducing CO2, which is important everywhere.”
<div>
Read more: http://autoweek.com/article/diesel/diesel-no-nox-its-possible#ixzz5C6hvWGeA</div>
And whoever mentioned Fischer Tropsch, lol, SA only seriously started that nonsense during Apartheid-era trade blockades. It’s a WW2 relic (pioneered by Germany who were under similar restrictions) and seriously inefficient. Sure, recycling biomass is fair enough but basing an entire system on it? Madness.The fundamental thing none of you seem to grasp is that there is no one answer. The future lies in diversity, splitting resources to suit their given application. Whether that’s ethanol, hydrogen, EV, diesel, biomass or whatever each has an advantage for a given situation. Brazil has an abundance of sugar waste to make ethanol, Finland pulps trees, sunny places get benefits of EV and can power electrolysis plants for hydrogen production (actually good for heavy vehicles even using conventional IC engines). We shouldn’t be concentrating on one source as that’s just not sustainable.
The topic ‘New Diesel engines’ is closed to new replies.