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Comment by thrownaway2424 | Hacker News Reader

Roger. My TDI Golf regularly gets more than 50 MPG on highway trips and averages 36 in our driving which is almost exclusively urban, easily more than the sluggish Honda Fit it replaced.

Unfortunately the VW and Audi still suffer from reliability problems. Two friends both with TDI VW cars suffered (Bosch) fuel pump failure that destroyed their engines to a large degree and cost about $6000 to repair.

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I'm in the UK and I've have a couple of vehicles, both European and both diesel. Not VW! They are great. I wouldn't buy anything else. Fuel here is expensive so it's a good idea to keep it simple.

I had a 2006 Citroen C3 diesel. Even with the air con on full whack, I could get 64mpg out of it on an average ~60mph journey. In London traffic, I got 52mpg out of it.

I now have a 2006 Fiat Doblo 1.3 diesel van/people carrier. This is a much larger vehicle but it's genuinely hard not to get at least 46mpg out of it with 5 people and a load of crap in it. On my own, 58mpg.

The latter had a timing chain replaced for around £500 but apart from consumables, no problems in several years.

I really don't get it when I see someone in a Dodge Ram (suddenly become popular in the UK?!?) hammering it up the motorways with no load or passengers.

I'm not sure about the UK but in the USA it is easy to write off trucks over 6000lbs as a business expense.

FIAT, fix it again tomorrow. Fiats have a lousy reputation and this is deserved in my experience. Also Puntos are the car I see most often abandoned by the roadside

Fiat produces quite reliable engines. Their multijet engines are unbeatable in the small gasoline engine class (1-1.2l). The JTD engines, while not Mercedes-quality, fare better than VW's TDIs.

Now, if you are talking about electrical wiring problems in their cars, I'll have to concede. It's the XXI century, and they still can't get wiring right.

Well based on the timing chain replacement alone, I'd agree but I've done 40k miles in it and that's been the only problem.

Some people don't get the luck I have out of a Doblo:

http://www.ausmotive.com/images/Fiat-van.jpg

1 US mpg = 1.2 UK mpg

and the EU method for calculating those numbers is, so I hear, more lenient than its US equivalent, so those numbers sound more impressive than they really are.

That's the reason I have not purchased one. If these repairs were covered by warranty, I'd probably go for it.

Diesel is about 11% more energy dense by volume than gasoline. So if you're buying diesel for less than 11% more than gas, you're getting a good deal.

When I was looking at cars the diesels had a premium of about $5,000 over the equivalent gas car. That's over four years of gas if you drive 15,000mi/yr at 50MPG and $4/gal or 3.75 years at 45MPG. That's something else to consider.

I didn't claim it was economically optimal, only that it gets good mileage.

I get 40MPG highway with a 200HP gas powered car that uses premium gas which costs about the same as diesal. With 4$ gas that extra 10MPG would take 250,000 miles to break even. Unfortunately Diesal also costs more to repair so your looking at well over 300,000 miles before break even vs a small but sporty car.

How long will that 23 cents a litre fuel difference take to pay off?

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