Anyway, remember VW themselves had engines that met the spec just fine. They only cheated so they could omit the AdBlue system.
They specifically set goals and policies to make diesels a larger presence (hence why so many power diesel sedans and small cars were made for the EU market but not the US).
The worst you can really accuse them of is lax oversight.
It would be so much better if we just started taxing externalities like carbon or fertilizer runoff and let markets decide the tech to do it organically.
But let's not let the car oligopoly completely off the hook. At some point they all took that step over the line.
1) even if powered 100% by coal plants, these plants have an higher efficiency than cars' internal combustion engines, especially if you consider the energy/co2 emissions due to the distillation process of petrol/diesel. Moreover, having a huge central plant means that you can install heavy and big filters and possibly re-capture some of that co2. You can't do this with cars
2) not all the power comes from coal plants, some from nuclear, some from natural gas, and even from renewables sources
3) when we finally crack nuclear fusion / thorium reactors / we found a way to store the surplus of renewables for underperforming times in a good way (like with molten salt https://newatlas.com/mit-molten-salt-battery-membrane/53085/ ) we can be carbon free from as soon as these technologies spread, without having to way for consumers to change cars
4) Pushing people to use newer technologies means that companies will spend more in R&D on this subject. Imagine if someone finally invents a battery with energy capacity of 5x current Li-ion. A car like the model 3 will have ~ 1500 kms of range
...
Of course there are points in favor of petrol/diesel cars, like the fact that producing current batteries is not that good for the environment, but if we don't invest on this we'll never have the incentive to overcome these problems.
> "Imagine if someone finally invents a battery with energy capacity of 5x ".
3 & 4 are exactly examples of the original point I was making. We shouldn't plan out decisions today based on the lottery machine of future discoveries. None of these advancements are guaranteed.
In the 1910s, steam power was the most promising tech for the development of the automobile. It's hard to imagine a world where we could have just dumped enough R&D into steam power to overcome the natural shortcomings.
more likely it'll have ~ 700km of range, but only cost half the price!
Yes they have incredible thermal efficiency, but two things come to mind: The grid does not, and coal has particular difficulty in controlling particulate emissions. This is particularly true of brown coal, which has a very high water content. Just to be particularly frustrating, coal is not distilled the way diesel is (which is famous for particulate emissions) so it tends to have other stuff like excessive sulphur. Though in that case, that stuff ends up in the bunker oil that goes in big ships.
It wasn't that the regulators were 'picking winners from specific technologies' as you claim, but they were favouring any vehicle with a low CO2 emission per kilometer. If that was achievable by a petrol car, then it was rewarded; low emission petrol cars got the same break, but they're inherently less efficient due to the lower compression ratio of a petrol engine.
Diesel comes with a higher energy density which means there are more CO2 emissions per burned liter of Diesel in comparison to gas.
Burning a liter of Diesel emits 2.6kg of CO2, gas 'only' emits 2.3kg of CO2 [1].
Plus, a Diesel engine is heavier compared to a gas engine with comparable specs.
[1] https://www1.wdr.de/wissen/technik/kohlenstoffdioxid-sprit-1...
However, what is certain is that the CO2 savings from diesel is small and certainly less than 50%. That's not going to get us where we need to go in terms of carbon emissions.
> but they were favouring any vehicle with a low CO2 emission per kilometer
You're making two statements here which sound like they're more or less the same, but they aren't. The first is true, the second is not.
An equivalent-power diesel car produces less CO2. But they aren't equivalent. The tax breaks and lower fuel use led to bigger cars. On average Diesel cars have higher CO2 emissions per kilometer.
I don't think that's true (in the UK at least) - both in that it's vanishingly rare to find a petrol vehicle that fit into the lowest 5 UK tax brackets (which are g/km of CO2) - and also in terms of real-world fuel use. I've owned probably 70 cars in the last 10 years or so (I buy and sell as a side gig), and all of the diesels have had lower fuel use for equivalent performance. They tend to be 'one size bigger' in terms of engine (so, say a 1.9 instead of a 1.6, or a 1.4 instead of a 1.1), but even taking that into account they will be a 10-20 mpg better on fuel, with a petrol 1.4 focus giving maybe 30 mpg average, and a diesel (1.6) one easily making 45-50 mpg, more on a run. And that means lower CO2 emissions.
Yeah, you might see the occasional stupidly large diesel car/chelsea tractor, but most of them are 1.9D VAG, and 1.6 or 2.0 Peugeot/Citroen/Ford HDI/TDCIs - there are hundreds of thousands of them out there on the roads.
We don't know that. Diesel is far more prevalent with bigger cars because they tend to eat through more energy over their lifetime, making it more likely to break even on the up-front premium for diesel (not just more joule per kilometre, but typically also far more kilometres per year). But chances are that without diesel, cars in Europe would be just as big today (e.g. they still tend to be smaller that in a certain famously petrol-centric country)
The push should have been for Propane.
Propane is cleaner than almost any other carbon source. Also, you don't have to get it from the Middle East.
Also you should have mentioned LPG, to allow it to be related to existing initiatives (which have now seen decline).