In 2006 I replaced my honda pilot with a new jetta tdi. I have put 157,000 miles on it and have never driven anything so fuel efficient, at 80 mph it gets 45mpg in the winter and 47mpg in warmer weather. It has a 6spd dual clutch automatic, good performance out of the hole, but it does lack guts through the longer end of the power curve. I am hoping for a subaru or other high quality manufacturer diesel as an option when I drive the wheels off of this one. Unfortunately, the newer clean diesels get less miles per gallon, rated at 30/40 vs 39/46 for the 1.9l tdi. For you diesel drivers, I know that you don’t need convincing.
Not really a deal. Look Eu has given preference to diesel for 50 years through taxes and support of diesel refinery. The cost difference in the US is simple. Taxes. We tax diesel high due to the high level of use by heavy trucks. The heavy trucks cause more road damage and the taxes pay for a lot of the road repair. It is a large integrated system. We could not switch to diesel without changing the fuel refinery production system. Originally we went to gasoline due to sweet texas crude about 80 years ago. Under that technology gasoline was the easiest to produce given the light grade of the crude. 40 years ago new tech has made it easier to produce a different type of cracking, but the plants take a long time to build(8-10 years), each one is custom to the crude it takes as a feed stock. A plant using canadian tar oil cannot use brent crude Etc… Not a conspiracy just a practical thing that will take 8-10 years to work through if the prices are stable for that long.
Euro diesels are not clean. They are really bad polluters of micron sized sulfur compounds associated with heart disease, asthma, and lung infections.
20% of $30000 is $6000 not $1500.
What are you babbleing about? Your numbers bear no resemblance to reality. Have you though about the cost of all the equipment and shipping of oil. Saudis produce oil at about 37$ per barrel as crude. Their wells are damaged due to poor handleing and are mostly in secondary recovery. This means they have to pump water into the wells to get oil, separate the oil and water and repump the water in to the wells. It is complicated but essentially earlier efforts to produce oil from saudi wells, in the 60’s damaged the rock layers and no one believed that the natural gas should be pumped back into the well to keep the resevoir pressure up. They burned the gas off as waste.
Honda has always had a outstandingly good reputation for “RUNNING FOREVER”, so if you made a diesel that ran “forever” and combined the two, Honda would go bankrupt due to the lack of money you spend (or don’t spend) on repairing you car.
Thanks for the reponse; yes some Saudi wells are higher cost producers. The majority are very good producers needing little captal investment compared to stripper wells in the US and parts of Mexico.
Oil is about the only real export product of Saudi Arabia with a polpulation of 14 million and 4 million guest workers. When oil was $30 a barrel a few years back, the Saudis were still rolling in money! The good wells at that time still had a wellhead production cost of $0.50 /barel. That is not counting the original investement of course, which was made many years ago.
After the normal wellhead pressure goes down it is customery (everywhere) to use "enhanced’ recovery with CO2, or water, or re-injecting natural gas. Agree that for years Saudi Arabia flared associated gas, but after the president of Bechtel convinced them in the early 70s to use it a either a fuel for desalination and power plants as well a as a chemical feedstock, there is considerabvly less flaring. They now make polyethylene, fertilizer and a number of other chemicals.
Your $37 per barrel production costs are true for such high cost oil sources as the Canadian Oilsands and difficult oil deposits in Venezuela.
New oil wells in the USA and other countries that still have normal oil to be discovered have about $7/barrel for finding and developing the oil, and an ongoing $5-$7 for the ongoing operation of pumping it, assumimg it is light conventional oil…
However, as you point out, the easy oil has been mostly found and developed. The more difficult conventional oils now need about $10-$20 dollars a barrel to be produced; still a good investment if the selling price is $100 a barrel.
When I was in Saudi Arabia in 1982, the world selling price for oil was just over $10/barel, and their production as only just over 2.5 million barrels/day and the were balancing the budget, and feeding a population of 12 million.
The American Petroleum Institute and the International Energy Agency has lots of statistics to put a face on all this.
If oil cost $37/barrel to produce in Saudi Arabia, it would be a poor country indeed, and could not support 4000 princes living in the lap of luxury and it could not support all the “schooling” in other Muslim countries to train all those terrorists.
[b] In the real world it's not 50 MPG. Actually it's realistically not even 40-45 MPG.[/b]
OK but don't tell my car that. I get about 45 mpg city and 50 highway. That is using real calculation (number of miles driven since last fill up and number of gallows on the current fill up). It is a small (VW NB) and a diesel (TDI). However I suspect my driving style is more likely a major contributor.[i] Backstage, the oil companies have made a deal.[/i]
Not really. There are a number of factors that cause "odd" pricing.
That said, the oil companies are driven by profit. The oil pricing is a complex structure. Oil is exchanged, different countries have different rules, farm use, industrial use etc also enter into the mix.
So while I don't believe in the conspiracy theories, I do believe that the market is such that the end result is just as bad.They may last forever…but the vast majority of people don’t keep their new cars past 100k miles.
Why because nobody in the higher ups in a company are willing to take a chance.
If you were a exec. and the reports you saw said Americans won’t buy diesels, would you be willing to risk YOUR job on a gamble?
If it goes gangbusters the higher execs say “why didn’t you do this sooner?” and if goes bust then they say “You saw the report why did you waste millions on something you knew wouldn’t work.”
So basically there’s no up side for you, so why take a chance? Let someone else prove there’s a market first then jump in.
It the big reason big companies are so slow to react. That’s why you tend see a small company being first to the market, they take the risk and the big companies wait and see how it turns out.
My opinions are subject to change with new facts
Car companies don’t go bankrupt because they make long lived cars. Quite the contrary! Take a poor quality car like a Chevy Aveo, which typically barely makes it to 100,000 miles. During that time it needs a number of average cost repairs (some under warranty) and constantly frustrates its owner who unloads it ASAP at a firesale price to the next owner who treats it as a dispoable car. Then, at 120,000 miles or so it’s junked. Just like Yugos, Renault “Le Cars”, Hyundai Ponies. etc.
Then take a Honda Civic, which is a nice, reliable car and allows owners many years of reliable ownership. During that time it will have a battery, starter, several sets of brakes, a radiator, perhaps struts and belts installed. Because it’s a good car, subsequent owners do not feel they are sending “good money after bad” when fixing a Civic. Most people I know who parted with their Civics still felt an emotional attachment because of its faithful service.
Having worked in the manufacturing industry, any mechanical piece of equipment has about 12% of the total sales devoted to parts, and 88% to the new vehicles. The PROFIT, however, is 50% parts, 50% original vehicle. That holds true if the manufacturer makes all the replacement parts, which for high volume vehicles is not always true of course.
Diesels made their sales during the first gas crisis in the mid seventies.What-ever that percentage was,it probably is very close to todays sales.
I’m sure it has increased a small amount due to power increase and fume/smell decrease.
Alot of people forget, or were not around when gas was rationed. Odd/even numbered tags determined the day of the week to purchase fuel.
Long lines that extended out into the streets. Many people waited an hour or more, only to be turned away when the gas ran out.
Alot of gas station employees wore sidearms.Fuel theft was rampant.License plate theft also was common place.
You would think after that scenario we would have built more refineries and drilled more.
Well if V-Dub hasnt made the case for great friggin Diesel’s then I guess we ARE doomed. I mean seriously…have you guys familiarized yourselves with the latest TDi’s…they really have no downside…its all upside I think…and if this company cant do it…then we really wont get a Honda Diesel or Subaru or what not…methinks
If you were a exec. and the reports you saw said Americans won’t buy diesels, would you be willing to risk YOUR job on a gamble?
And what makes you think that. I for one would LOVE to see own a 4-cylinder turbo Diesel SUV. Been waiting for one to hit the US market after reading about them in Europe and seeing one in South America. I’d like to know where you got your stats from…saying Americans don’t want diesels.
Because they use surveys to see what we want, "Targeting by age, the survey found that 50 percent of people between 18 and 29 years in age and 46 percent of those between 30 and 41 would consider buying or leasing a new clean diesel car. "
So the 18 to 29 year old crowd would consider a diesel, not that they would buy but they would at least consider it. But then add in the price difference and suddenly they aren’t that interested anymore. To be competitive can’t cost that much more than a gasoline powered car. Just look at a dodge ram truck the option of a diesel is $7,500 so even if a car diesel was only $2,000 you’d lose a lot of people just on the price difference. You and I both know most diesel will go just about forever, but most people don’t keep there cars that long, so there’s no real payback for them.
But remember the question was why can’t we have the Honda diesel, so as an exec. you’re already looking at 50+ percent of you potential customers won’t even consider a diesel, then you’re looking at the many more who won’t pay the extra dollars for a diesel, people are driven by price more than anything else. So your average buyer is looking at two cars one diesel and one gas powered, there’s a thousand or two difference between the two, your average buyer is going to say why should I pay that much more for the same car and buy the cheaper of the two. And say to themselves “do you know how much gas I can buy with the difference.”
Like I said as an exec. would you risk you job on diesel or wait until there is a strong market for them?
Yes I would buy one and I would buy a diesel motorcycle, but it sounds like we are the exception not the rule.
The survey was Co-sponsored by the Diesel Technology Forum and Mercedes-Benz USA.
My opinions are subject to change with new facts
I would take the risk…and go for it…then again I’m told daily that Im an idiot by my girl…so what do I know. LOL
I think we are rapidly approaching the same thing with these gas prices shooting up like this…this is friggin ridiculous…WHY is it happening and why does it always happen right when half of the country is about to come out of hibernation and start driving again…I mean they are about to start making A LOT more money…why gouge us now…you would think it would go down with more people about to be “users”. It makes me sick…every year
In the “risk” area Every Volt GM is making is finding a buyer. Perhaps the “will people buy the Volt” part of the question has been answered but many other questions about the Volt still exist. Myself I hope it works. I also wish I was entering the Dealer workforce now at about 26 or so to get in on these exciting developments.
The OP has it exactly right. If VW can?t make a go of selling a great diesel then what chance is there to see more? There are plenty of diesel models being made around the globe, just not for the American market. Honda dropped its plan to market a 2.2 diesel. Subaru has a 2.0 diesel but has been putting off selling it here. Ford brought out a 5 cylinder diesel in 2008, for Europe.
http://news.pickuptrucks.com/2010/09/ford-previews-all-new-global-ranger-but-its-not-coming-to-north-america.html
Even Fiat has a diesel. (Maruti Swift)
For an eye opening view of what?s available elsewhere try India:
http://www.carazoo.com/dieselcars/dslc0701200805/Ford-Fiesta
We can only hope.