Mitlov,
People there have been living on $10 a piece apple, $200 sushi or French dinner, and the current $6 per gallon gas… telling people of NA that cheap gas and cheap hamburger (albeit contaminated) are not god-given right.
Now, let’s get back to the question of diesel emission.
1) No matter how clean the current gas engine vehicles are, the air we breathe does not get much cleaner as long as diesel cars, buses, trucks and farm equipment keep belching out soot, HC, sulfuric compounds and NOX.
2) Already DPF and NOX filters are available for retrofitting purpose.
3) Although reduction of CO2 emission is important (my 300HP car is a source, so are all the fossil fuel burners), soot, NOX and sulfuric compounds are directly harmful to us to-day.
4) In Europe diesel cars are popular NOT because they are cleaner. It is because of the preference of economy-mined consumers and with the exception of the small number of the latest models they are much dirtier than the gas counterpart.
5) To-day’s gas engine is very clean thanks to the closed-loop fuel management system (which maintains stoichiometric combustion throughout a wide range of load conditions) and the 3-way cat converter.
6) Cleaning-up effort of diesel engine is still in progress and so far solutions are expensive.
7) European automakers are trying to shift consumer’s attention to CO2 (Diesel engines are better in this department because of their higher thermal efficiency) away from more immediate problem of soot and NOX.
