"We will make the diesel engine as clean as a gasoline engine," the chairman of DaimlerChrysler, Dieter Zetsche, said. "We are well on the way to giving CO2 emissions the priority needed" – said at his press conference at this years IAA Dieter Zetsche, the chairman of DaimlerChrysler.
Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Volkswagen plan to sell new diesel cars in the United States in the coming year - betting that diesel will become the chief alternative to the hybrid gasoline-electric engines popularized by Toyota and other Japanese carmakers.
Autospies.com reports that BMW is already running print ads of its diesels even though we won't be able to buy them until late 2008.
Today, fewer than 3 percent of passenger vehicles in the United States are diesel, compared to more than 30 percent in Europe. In 2006, more than half of all new cars sold in Europe were diesels. In Britain, BMW said it increased the diesel share of its cars from 7 percent to 70 percent in three years.
But the Europeans are not the only ones pushing it. General Motors and Ford plan to sell more pickups with diesel engines, and GM will produce a new diesel engine at a plant near Buffalo, New York.
"Pickups will be one wedge to bring diesel back into the U.S., while the European carmakers will be the other," said Gregg Sherrill, the chief executive of Tenneco, an auto-parts company that supplies exhaust systems to U.S., European and Japanese manufacturers.
Diesels are known for getting extra mileage out of every gallon of fuel. They offer better torque than many gasoline engines. And their price differential over gasoline models generally is much smaller than that for hybrids. Now diesels are even cleaner than hybrids.
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