Insight: Is it time to give up on the diesel engine?
Once we were all encouraged to buy diesel-engined cars, but now they are being ostracised because of health concerns. So, should we desert diesel?
Finding the correct answers to these burning questions seems to be
clouding more and more car purchase decisions. There are supporters for
each of the above courses of action – but the arguments for banning
diesels are becoming ever more shrill, led notably by Sunday
newspapers quoting doctors’ organisations and academic sources in
support of their case, and diesel sales are falling as a result.
The industry’s view is multi-faceted and complex. First, while carefully
admitting ‘more can always be done’, its experts believe that when
current, tough Euro 6 (EU6) emissions standards are combined with much
more realistic and impartial test regimes that arrive this September
(called WLTP or Worldwide harmonised Light vehicles Test Procedure), a
modern car’s output of NOx will have been cut to tiny proportions.
Diesels should be free to get right on with their job of contributing to
lower CO2.
Second, the automotive industry is understandably reluctant to criticise
the cars it has already put on the road, on the grounds that they
complied with the legislation of the time. UK car users have bought
roughly a million diesels per year and there are an estimated 12m diesel
cars and vans already on our roads. Penalising them would create havoc.
Completely changing the car parc, if you started now, could take 20
years.
Third, Europe’s motor industry needs to preserve its markets,
viability and infrastructure to fund new, electrified cars planned along
its ‘glidepath’ towards the 95g/km manufacturer fleet average that's
required by 2020 – and onward towards a hoped-for zero-emissions future
in 2050. (In the UK, Jaguar Land Rover has just opened a new diesel
plant in Wolverhampton and Ford builds most of its world requirement for
diesels in Dunton).
Fourth, its bosses are extremely reluctant to wade into a complex,
illogical debate that has conflated Volkswagen’s highly publicised
diesel emissions scandal in the US with a 15-year-old progression of EU
emissions standards – currently at EU6 – whose fuel consumption results
bear so little resemblance to owners’ experience that they are presumed
to be dishonest. ‘They’re all at it’ is the common accusation.
The most urgent problem, identified by London mayor Khan, appears to be
the profusion of old-school diesels – notably, well-worn and decades-old
taxis, trucks and delivery vans as well as passenger cars – on our
roads. The mayor has already hit the headlines, and been rebuffed by the
government, for proposing a £500m scrappage scheme that would pay
diesel owners up to £3500 for ditching old diesel cars.
(AutoCar.co.uk)
