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Comment by kosmic_k | Hacker News Reader

Diesel can run clean, it's just they'll be far more expensive and produce far less power than their gasoline alternatives. The entire european diesel wonder was that engines of similar power were able to offer better milage than those of gasoline. However this has been all due to substantially worse emissions. For VW to bring emissions down to regulation the engines will produce significantly less power and customers will no longer want to use them.

Simply put, this is the death of diesel for automobiles. It's just a dead end technology that has thrived by cheating. Europe was dead wrong in their automotive efficiency priorities and public health has suffered as a result.

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VW is not the only supplier of diesel engines and the other manufacturers to date have not been proven to cheat (though it may very well be that Mercedes, BMW or some other company will end up in the same docket besides VW when all is said and done as far as I know there is no proof of this at the present).

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).

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.

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