Cleanest Diesels on Earth Coming to US this Fall (+Timeline)

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New diesels will get better mileage and have cleaner emissions than your average car. Pictured above: 2009 Jetta SportWagen 2L TDI Clean Diesel.

Later this year (see the timeline below), we will finally begin to see an influx of new model diesels in the United States. While diesels make up 50% of the market share of vehicles in Europe, they’re still trying to shrug off the stigma of being dirty, noisy beasts here in the US. So what changed?

What are “clean” diesels?

In 2006, the EPA required the introduction of Ultra Low Sulfur Diesel (ULSD), which removed a major polluting component of diesel fuel. Since sulfur would damage advanced emissions control systems, ULSD paved the way for better emissions control technology.

As early as August, we will start to see a new era of diesels that employ new technology to meet the strictest emissions standards in the world—BIN5/LEV II—which are enforced by 5 US states: California, Massachusetts, Maine, New York, and Vermont. BIN5/LEV II standards severely cap nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions (0.05 g/mile), one of the two tailpipe pollutants that have given diesels a bad rap (that and particulate matter).

Newer filters in these emissions systems trap particulate matter, while each model uses its own method to process NOx. Several models, including those from BMW, Mercedes, and Audi, will require the maintenance of a six- to eight-gallon tank of urea. The ammonia-rich solution (for example: Mercedes BlueTEC) is injected into exhaust to neutralize smog-forming nitrogen oxides. Since the urea tanks only require replenishing every 12,000 miles or so, inconvenience seems minimal, and some models, like Honda and VW diesels, meet emissions requirements without them.

While you might expect most of these diesels to get exceptional mileage, some of them do surprisingly poor. For example, the Mercedes and Audi models only get around 18/25 MPG (making this a good reason to continue to avoid SUVs). I know that the new emissions technology is supposed to negatively affect mileage, but 25 MPG is unimpressive, considering that VW’s Jetta BlueTDI got a road tested 60 MPG.

While the high price of diesel fuel is eating into some of the economic advantage of buying a new diesel vehicle, the difference is offset by mileage gains of 25 to 40% over comparable gas models. You might not see too much difference in sticker prices, either. Some models could cost $1,500 to $3,500 more for this new emissions control technology, but VW says its Jetta SportWagens could cost $2,000 less. Also be on the lookout for Federal tax credits that could be as large as $3,400 per vehicle.

When can we expect to see clean diesels in the US? Here’s the timeline:

1. Volkswagen

• When: August 2008
• Models: 2009 Jetta BlueTDI sedans and SportWagens
• Engine: 2-liter turbodiesel in-line 4
• Est. Mileage: 33/46 m.p.g. Sedan road tested at 60 MPG.
• Est. Base Price: $22,000 to $25,000

2. Mercedes

• When: November 2008
• Models: Mercedes-Benz ML320 Bluetec, other GL-, ML- and R-Class sport crossover utilities (and someday: Vision GLK BlueTec diesel hybrid).
• Engine: 3-liter turbodiesel V-6
• EPA Mileage: 18/24 m.p.g.
• Est. Base Price: $46,000

3. BMW

• When: Fall 2008
• Models: 335d sedan and X5 35d sport wagon
• Engine: variable twin-turbo 6-cylinder
• Est. Mileage: ?
• Est. Base Price: ?
  

4. Audi

• When: January 2009
• Models: Q7 3.0 TDI utility wagon
• Engine: 3-liter turbodiesel V-6
• Est. Mileage: 18/25 m.p.g.
• Est. Base Price: $53,000

5. Honda (yes it’s true)

• When: 2009
• Models: Acura TSX sedan, other models could follow
• Engine: 2.2-liter i-DTEC
• Est. Mileage: 34/53 MPG
• Est. Base Price: ?

6. Jeep

• When: 2009
• Models: Jeep Grand Cherokee

7. General Motors/Ford/Dodge

• When: 2009 or 2010
• Models: Light-duty pickup trucks

8. Nissan

• When: 2010
• Models: Maxima sedan

9. Subaru

• When: 2010
• Models: Legacy sedan or Outback wagon
• Engine: 2-liter turbodiesel flat 4
• Est. Mileage: 33/47 m.p.g. (Outback)
• Est. Base Price: $28,000 (Outback)
  

  

Header Photo Credit: VW

For more, see: Diesel Engines Clean Up for an Encore (New York Times)

Posts Related to Clean Diesels:

• 2009 Jetta BlueTDI Comes to US This Summer, Sports 60 MPG and Cleaner Emissions
• Sorry Folks, VW Diesel Electric Hybrid Not Coming to US
• Mercedes 40-MPG Diesel Hybrid: Cleanest SUV on the Planet
• The World’s Most Fuel Efficient Car: 285 MPG, Not A Hybrid
• Biodiesel Guide: 7 Steps to Buying a Diesel

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Rising Gas Prices, Planet Warming: Time To Drive 55 Again?

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Congress adopted a nationwide 55 mph speed limit law during the oil embargo of the 1970s and threatened to withhold highway funding for any state that didn't comply. It repealed the law 13 years ago, when oil was cheap and gas plentiful. But with prices going through the roof and everyone worried about global warming, there are increasing calls for Congress to bring back the double-nickel speed limit.

Advocacy groups like drive55.org say rolling the speed limit back to 55 will save fuel, reduce pollution and save lives. It seems logical, but not everyone is convinced slower speeds bring any real benefit, and the debate is heating up.

"Sheer physics tell you lower speeds equal better fuel economy, fewer injuries and lower emissions," said Justin McNaull, director of state relations for AAA. "But what happens when you change the speed limit is a little less clear."

It depends upon who you want to believe.

Connecticut adopted the nation's first vehicular speed limit 107 years ago today - setting the maximum speed at 12 in the city and 15 in the country - and people have been ignoring them ever since. Congress set the limit at 55 mph under the National Maximum Speed Law of 1974. The law was repealed 19 years later and the states allowed to set their own limits. Most of them bumped it up to 65 mph, although some went to 75 mph and there are stretches of highway in west Texas where you can cruise at 80.

The U.S. Department of Energy says gas mileage plummets above 60 mph and says every 5 mph above that speed is akin to paying an additional $0.20 per gallon for gas. But the American Heritage Foundation claims 12 years of 55 mph speed limits cut fuel consumption by just 1 percent. After Congress repealed the National Maximum Speed Law and 33 states raised their speed limits, the Cato Institute said traffic deaths dropped to a record low.

More than fuel economy and traffic deaths are at stake now. "Emissions increase pretty appreciably above 55," McNaull says. drive55.org claims Washington state would cut CO2 emissions by 10 percent if it cut its 70 mph speed limit by 15 mph. But even here, the evidence is debated. The Automobile Association in England claims reducing the speed limit from 30 mph to 20 on residential roads would increase CO2 emission by more than 10%.

drive55.org also says the average speed people travel on the highway has been rising for 20 years. McNaull notes that advances in vehicle deign, such as better windows and sound proofing have changed peoples' sense of how fast they're going, which is one reason people regularly exceed the posted speed limit. "Doing 60 mph in a 2008 vehicle feels a lot different than in the vehicles our grandparents drove."

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10 Quick Fuel Efficiency Tips to Beat the Gas Crunch

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The summer season of highway hell has officially arrived—and $4/gallon prices at the pump certainly aren't making life on the road any easier. As the next generation of hypermilers develops new ways to hack your car's fuel economy, our guest MPG geek breaks down the vehicle mods, driving habits and common-sense fixes you need to know to max out your tank.

Three or four days after buying my first car, I came to a disturbing revelation: Paying for your own gasoline is expensive! You don't realize just how much of a pain in the butt it can be—and how much junk advice is out there on the Web—until the entire financial burden rests solely on your shoulders. So I decided to geek out, learning everything I could about how to squeeze more miles per gallon into every fill-up—and share it with the rest of the pump-fearing masses.

Over the past couple years, I've tried every gimmick—acetone, fuel-line magnets, intake air swirlers, you name it—to top out on gas mileage with my 1991 Honda CRX. Needless to say, these gimmicks didn't get me anywhere—as Popular Mechanics' own Mike Allen has proved so many times, and he's debunking them once again. So I jumped on the fuel-economy bandwagon with the next generation of Mike Allens. Some call us hypermilers, but at my MPG forum and blog, we go by ecomodder—someone who combines car tweaks, behind-the-wheel techniques and some basic skills to cut back on trips to the gas station.

My new lifestyle has taken me from an average (but very unsatisfying) 30 mpg to an efficient 55 mpg in the last year, and the 70 mpg mark is looming on the horizon. With gas prices hovering around $4/gallon and forecasts scouting even worse news, getting even more out of every gallon of go juice has become even more important to me—and you can get in on the action, too.

Being a bit of a tech- and gear-head, some of my mods (such as converting my automatic transmission to manual, with my lean burning Japanese-market Civic VX engine just arriving in the mail for a transplant) might seem a bit extreme. Still, while I've beaten the 27-mpg EPA rating on my CRX by over 30 percent with the best practices below, there's so reason you can't go out and cut at least 10 percent before a summer road-trip weekend. These simple tricks will definitely help you save fuel—without ripping your car apart.

1. Track Your Mileage in Real Time

Knowing what your consumption looks like from tank-to-tank is important, but that's really not enough. Knowing what mileage you're getting in real time—being able to compare it to what you got yesterday or even 10 minutes ago—is the new way to drive these days.

Luckily, ecomodding combines the love of saving money and adding gadgets to my car. People with cars made after 1995 have it relatively easy: All you need to do is throw some money at a fuel-economy computer like the Scangauge, and you're instantly instrumented. For older cars, you may need to get your knuckles dirty by installing a vacuum gauge, which measures how hard the engine is working, or explore the growing world of DIY fuel-economy electronics, like the arduino-based MPGuino. Either way, a conscious mind combined with instant feedback should get you that instant 10 percent.

2. Only Brake When You Have to

I recently found myself fighting against a 20-mile backup passing through Hartford, Conn. The traffic wasn't exactly stop-and-go, but the pack was constantly speeding up and abruptly slowing down. So I did something a little different.

When everyone started taking off, I gave myself a 10- or 15-second buffer before hitting the gas and accelerating. By accelerating slowly and leaving space ahead, I could see the brake lights ahead before I expended a significant amount of gas, coasting right back up to the car in front of me. If I timed it just right, my Honda would meet the car just as it started up again, without using the brakes at all. My gas mileage actually went up to over 70 mpg while sitting in traffic!

3. Always Stay Alert on the Road

To drive without brakes or coast toward stops effectively, you have to know what's going on around you and be able to anticipate how traffic will play out. That means paying attention to the lights on your daily commute—heck, memorizing them—and trying to anticipate whether they will, say, turn green by the time you get there. And, again, always look several cars ahead to see if the brake lights are starting to come on in anticipation of a coast.

4. Drive Like You're on a Bike

OK, don't necessarily go 20 mpg out there, but try to imagine biking over the same route that you're driving on: When you're headed uphill, it takes a lot more effort to maintain speed than it does going down, so give the car a break and let yourself lose a few mph on the way up. Relax, you'll easily get it back on the other side. Your car burns the most gas when it's forced into high-load situations, so try to remember what makes biking difficult (like going really fast, accelerating really hard and speeding up hills), and make those situations as painless as possible by laying off the gas.

5. Make Your Car Your Own

Every mainstream passenger car is a compromise built with many different drivers in mind. Because there are all too few vehicles built specifically with gas mileage as the primary design element, there's a lot of improvement to be had in modifying your existing ride. Some people will do little things to improve aerodynamics, like adding a grill block, smooth wheel covers or rear-wheel skirts. Others will remove alternators, swap engines or convert their car to run all-electric. Either way, optimizing the design of your car is one of the most effective ways to improve fuel economy. After all, it was my automatic-to-manual conversion that really boosted me from the high 30s and low 40s to that 55-mpg territory.

6. Pump Up Your Tires—Really

One of the biggest areas in which manufacturers compromise fuel economy for comfort is in tire pressure. That 32-psi rating is mainly there to make the ride smooth as silk, even as you run over potholes and pedestrians. It can be controversial, but believe it: To get the best mileage out of your car, up the pressure to the maximum listed on the sidewall. The ride will get a bit rougher, but your rolling resistance will be reduced and you'll get better gas mileage. But don't just do it once and forget about it! Make sure to check your tire pressure every other time you fill up, or you could be leaking air and losing MPGs.

7. Use the Right Ride for the Job

It may seem like a no-brainer, but it may be the ultimate fuel-saver: Why take a gas-guzzling SUV to work when a smaller, more efficient fuel-sipper will do? And if public transportation or carpooling is an option, you'll not only save on gas, but also wear-and-tear on your vehicle.

8. Multi-Task With Your Daily Routine

Are you going out to run weekly errands, or are you just dropping one letter off at the post office and coming right home? You will essentially cut distance traveled and fuel usage in half by making all your stops at once, instead of taking lots of short roundtrips.

9. Plan Your Route Ahead of Time

Take the path of least resistance. That's one with fewer stoplights, not as much traffic and, yes, lower speed limits. Even if you save 0.1 gallons of gas each day, you'll save more than $130 per year.

10. Avoid Rush Hour at All Costs

These days, many offices are offering flexible hours, so errands can be run at any time. Try to avoid being stuck in traffic if all you have to do is leave 30 minutes earlier or come in 30 minutes later. And, yeah, set those alarms and take off for the beach early this summer. With those prices at the pump, you deserve it.

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Highway Ladder Transport

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The Best Parking Lot "Apology" Note of All Time

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7 Completely Unnecesary Jet Engine Powered Vehicles

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Image by Ben Goode

I’m sure most of you remember the comedian Tim Allen and his show Home Improvement–he was dedicated to the glory of all things manly, more power, more horsepower, more sawdust, and football, and big, loud, fast cars, UGHH GRUNT MANLY NOISE. Obviously, if absolutely everyone used needly overpowered contraptions, our global climate crisis would accelerate at the same pace. Sometimes however, it’s better to just poke fun and laugh rather than preach. So, in honor of that manly penchant for overkill, be it using a gas powered turbine for raking leaves off of your lawn, or watching television on a screen that costs more than your first car, Environmental Graffiti presents seven vehicles which have been modified to run off of a jet engine–and for which there is no explanation but testosterone.

7. The Jet Bicycle

It’s been in awesome sites all over the internet in recent days, from gizmodo to neatorama and back, Robert Maddox has attached a pulsejet to a common bicycle, and therefore made it possible for your paperboy to actually sound like the London Blitz. The bad news is that there may actually be a positive use for it in modern-day America; it’s fuel-efficient, and has a top speed suitable for freeways, something that we rarely find in combination in any vehicle.

Image from Gizmodo

You can watch a video below:

6. Jet-Powered VW Beetle
Ron Patrick, a mechanical engineering PhD, has some how, some way, made his VW Beetle street legal while still hanging a jet engine and afterburner out of the tail end of it. Using the gas-powered four cylinder for daily driving and the 1300 bhp jet for…whatever you would use a 1300 bhp jet for, he can outrun the fastest production car in the world, a Bugatti Veyron.

Image via Snassek

Check the youtube, and imagine how scary he could be at a red light:

5. Jet Powered Wheelchair

Giuseppe Cannella, a mechanically inclined Brit, decided for reasons known but to him to strap a jet engine and steering apparatus on his mother-in-law’s wheelchair.

Was it spite?

His wife, he says, told him to bolt it onto something unusual instead of a go-kart as he originally intended. A few days later the wheelchair of her dear mother was being cannibalized for the jet-powered glee of Giuseppe. The mother-in-law was actually out of town at the time, and when she returned, believed the freeway-speed medical device was for her, an aging Parkinson’s disease patient.

Images from BBC

4. Jet-Powered Port-A-John

Paul Sender, a mechanic by trade, has spent 10,000 dollars to build a toilet that shoots 30 foot-long fireballs out of the rear end of it (Go ahead, make your jokes, we’ll be here). The fastest toilet in the world has a top speed of 70 miles per hour, and presumably some sort of steering mechanism and brakes, although we could find no discussion of them anywhere on the internet, so it’s possible that one day you could be run down by an uncontrollable 70 mile per hour toilet with no brakes.

Image from Man-Sized. Yes, it’s for real.

Here’s an incredibly surreal video of it in action:

3. The Turbitrac Lawn Mower

The Turbitrac is a jet engine built by slightly nutty Englishman named Nick Haddock, who has taken it upon himself to not only design and build his own jet engine from scratch, but to post his instructions and reasons for doing so on the internet. Running off of propane, turbos, and components of a 7.5 ton truck engine, it can reach temperatures of over 600 degrees and provide quite a show at night.

Images from GP3

watch a video of it below fire up:

2. Jet-Powered Beer Cooler

A fairly crazy nameless New Zealander with a website embarked on a mission to prove his kiwidom not too long ago, because, as he saw it, you needed two things to be a resident of that island nation: a love of rugby, and a shed. Somehow, this left him compelled to cool his beer with a propane-fueled jet engine, a simple device that’s not really known for being applied to coolers. The principle is simple enough– the jet pulls the propane out of the tank, which sits in a tank in the beer cooler, and the propane exiting the tank creates an entropic system, removing heat from the beer. Wild, eh?

Image from Asciimation2
1. Shockwave Jet-Powered Semi

Shockwave is a regular on the air show cicuit, where driver Kent Shockley regularly fries up the THREE jet engines attached to his heavily modified Peterbilt frame, and exceeds 350 miles an hour. In a standing start quarter mile, he can reach speeds over 290 miles an hour in under 5 seconds, an experience so violent that most of us can’t even fathom it. It’s exceptional considering that 0-60 in that amount of time is great for a sportscar - Kent is almost at 300 mph by that stage.

Images below via Snassek

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The Tallest Building In The World Is Burj Dubai

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Dubai makes history! As of today, you can find the tallest man-made building in Dubai. The skyscraper is called Burj Dubai (burj means tower in Arabic) and the tower overtook the Warszawa radio mast in Poland which measures 646 meters. The Dubai-based skyscraper measures 650 meters and it’s expected to get even bigger and will reach 819 meters to the aircraft beacon.

Dubai should hurry up with the Burj because Kuwait’s Burj Mubarak Al-Kabir will be finished in 2012 and will measure 1,001 meters. Until then, Dubai will be very proud of their achievement and I’m guessing that they could start a project to make it even taller and to compete against Burj Mubarak Al-Kabir.

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