Why Can't America Have More Diesel Cars

In America we have always had huge cars that used lots of gas and until recently, low gas prices. Now gas is over $4.00 a gallon and the cars we drive are just too wasteful, but Europe has for a long time had a great solution, diesel cars. They used to be slow and dirty, but now they have turbochargers on all the diesels. That means diesel cars are now fuel efficient and just as fast as normal gasoline cars. The biggest problem with diesels was that they had bad smog emissions, but the new ones have urea filters that burn off the harmful sulfur and CO2 emissions.

In Europe people drive much smaller, more fuel efficient, and usually slower cars than we do. In Europe a fast car does 0-60mph in under 9 seconds, but here a fast car does 0-60 in under 7 seconds. That is silly when you spend a lot of time sitting in traffic and never need to do 0-60 in less than 10 or 11 seconds. Here a fuel efficient car gets over 30 mpg on the highway, but in Europe a fuel efficient car gets over 40mpg average between city and highway and are almost always diesel.

A good family car here is usually a SUV that gets less than 20mpg or a big minivan (they should be called bigivans and the huge Ford E-Series type van should be called trucks with an ugly box on top) that gets less than 25mpg. In Europe a good family family car is a small, but very practical diesel MPV. the Opel Zafira has 7 seats, a great chassis, lots of space, got a 5 star crash test rating, and gets 37mpg combined (average between city and highway) with a 150hp 1.9L 4 cylinder turbo diesel (0-60 in 9.7 seconds). Another great family car is a Mondeo based large MPV, the Ford S-Max and even larger Ford Galaxy. It drives very well, has a huge cargo area, has 7 seats (the third row is very good), was only 1 point away from beating the EuroNCAP crash test (the S-Max got 36 points, the Galaxy got 35 points, and 33 or higher is 5 stars), gets 35 mpg combined with the and does 0-60 in under 9 seconds both with the 173hp 2.2L turbo diesel 4 cylinder engine. In Europe the wonderful real new Ford Focus can get 54mpg combined with a 110hp 1.6L-4 turbo diesel and still does 0-60 in under 11 seconds. The best gas mileage you will find is the Seat Ibiza Ecomotive/Volkswagen Polo BlueMotion that both get 61mpg combined, but they are quite slow, 0-60 takes 12.8 seconds. These diesels are just what we need here since things like fuel cell, which in development and electric cars, which are too horribly unsafe, meaning diesel is the only existing good solution.