Re:Europe's love affair with diesel cars has been a disaster
by kosmic_k on Saturday October 17, 2015 @03:47PM
(#10405776)
The performance of diesel car's in recent years has been quite literally miraculous. If you knew a little bit about engines you would know that something was a off for there to have been such a dramatic improvement in power, efficiency, and emissions at no apparent cost. Diesel has traditionally not been the most powerful choice so for the power to be comparable was very fishy. Now just about every single diesel manufacture is being investigate from Europe to Japan for cheating. Initial reports are already showing that Mercedes, Toyota, and plenty of other players all have significantly worse emissions and efficiency.
Europe is cracking down on diesel, and they're going to remove tax breaks that cheating manufactures enjoyed. Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, is talking about ban these vehicles from the city by 2020. This is the end of european diesel cars.
So this not 'the death of diesel for automobiles', though it may definitely be the death of diesel sales for VW in the United States.
As for public health suffering: the best way to improve public health is to promote cycling, reducing the total mileage a person spends driving during their life is the biggest public health benefit you could score and from that perspective whether you focus on diesel or petrol or CO2 emissions versus NOx as the most important is time, effort and resources wasted.
I'm trying to imagine everybody that I see cycling here driving a vehicle and the resulting pollution would be astounding, especially for short trips (when the catalytic convertor has not yet warmed up).