Quote:
Originally Posted by zonker
I too think we could go a long way in making things easier by standardizing goverment standards across the board, however it still would keep a number of the better diesel alternatives from reaching our shores.
our grade of diesel fuel is not as refined as the diesel sold in EU. The US has/is in the process of upgrading the quality of diesel here but so far only to a cost effective point.
Higher quality diesel means higher priced diesel, and the US trucking industry is not a happy camper with that scenario since it will price themselves uncompetitive with rail. Now you know why Warren Buffet invested heavily in rail ;-)
To allow for direct injection diesel motors to reliably work here (direct injection is the key to those wUnder-diesels), more refining and even higher cost is required. This even has to do with the quality of the crude oil itself... part of the reason Libya (higher quality crude) is more important to the welfare of EU than to the US.
Theres also the question of whether the US public would jump ship to an oil burner, due to it's lower likelihood of finding a diesel station than a gasoline one. Women find the odor nasty, and the truck stops that sell them equally so.
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The infrastructure for automotive diesel fuel is there, just that the pricing is as such that it washes out any financial benefit of owning one right now.
The ULSD that we have here can run in the Euro and world diesels, even though it is utter garbage compared to the high cetane juice that's available everywhere else.
Oh, by the way, we have had direct injected diesels for a while now. Every diesel truck engine is direct injected, as are the car diesels from VAG, BMW and Mercedes Benz.