Diesels available in the USA

I regularly do 250 miles each way non-stop on motorway / dual-carriageway all the way - so at 70-80 mph. At the end of the journey, it's me that's tired, not the car!

The car's done 138,000 miles since new, and the only things that have failed have been the sort of things that could fail on any car: fan belt (twice in succession - garage didn't spot a wobbly pulley the first time), clutch (after about 70,000 miles) and routine service items like brake discs/pads, tyres and shock absorbers / dampers.

It's still returning the same fuel consumption that it did when it was new (well, excluding the first few thousand miles till the engine was properly loosened up) and it still feels to have as much acceleration and hill-climbing ability.

If you are in Europe, I might add that maintenance items are required under the EU inspection that are not even considered in the USA.

A lot of the cars on the road in the USA today would not be allowed on the road if they had to pass European rules.

Therefore, service items might appear to be more severe than they actually are, on an equal basis.

At one time garages used to fail a car on its MOT (annual inspection) if it had a blown light bulb in the indicator or brake light, then make you pay a retest fee. There seems to have been a change in the rules because now they will simply replace the bulb and record that as a pass. Even for major work they will do it (after getting your permission) and record that as a pass. From memory, the things that are covered in the MOT are: brakes (visual inspection of pads and discs; rolling road test for equal braking force left/right; handbrake applies at least a certain force when it's on), tyres (tread and sidewall), suspension (check for leaking dampers, check for bouncing), windscreen wipers and washer (do they clean the screen without leaving smears), structural load-bearing bodywork (or chassis, for cars that have one), exhaust emissions (CO2, CO, NOx, particulates for diesel etc), indicator/break/side/tail, alignment of headlights (check that they don't point too low or high when dipped and that they dip to the left (kerb) side), number plate (font, size - see next paragraph). Until the emissions test was introduced, it was not actually mandatory that a car being tested had a working engine - or even an engine at all ;-) What do US inspections test, and do the requirements vary from state to state or are the same across the country?

There are several construction and use regulations in the UK which are different: indicators must flash orange and must be separate to any other light, unlike in the US where combined indicator/side or indicator/brake lights are permitted; cars must have a front number plate as well as a rear one and both must be a prescribed size of plate, size of text and typeface. On the other hand, headlights may be rectangular as an alternative to round and they may swivel with the steering to "look" into a bend - I believe several European cars had to have their headlights modified from rectangular to round for export to the US and the Citroen DS had to have its steered headlights locked to the straight-ahead position. Maybe those restrictions have been relaxed in the US as well now.

US testing does indeed vary widely from state to state, and even areas within a state. As an example of the later, TX has an annual safety inspection which does cover lights, brakes, etc. similar to what you noted, but whether there is an emissions inspection depends on the county, and in my county there are no emissions inspections.

In America, if there were full size six passenger cars, 500 horsepower,

600 miles per gallon cars, the commie fed govt would be taxing everybody $100.00 per mile. cuhulin

As was mentioned by another poster, in Texas they check the lights and function of the brakes. Bald tires will fail you, wipers should work, etc. Minor stuff. Emissions tested in some counties.

An EU test takes a look at all those things and others, such as dripping motor oil, broken ball joint rubbers, broken CV joint rubbers, rust, and other things. You have to have them fixed or walk. I have mostly heard the term MOT used in the UK, and am not sure if this is now the same as the EU inspection or not.

Whenever my van is ue for a new safety sticker, I drive over to Pete Robertson's auto repair shop.He scrapes off the old sticker and then puts a new sticker on there and I pay $5.00 and that is that. cuhulin

I don't know whether there's an EU-wide standard for vehicle inspection tests and whether the UK's is more or less stringent than those in other EU countries.

There used to be a big black market trade in forged MOT certificates to make it look as if dangerous cars were still roadworthy. However the bottom dropped out of that when a computerised system was introduced, because the entry in the database became the definitive record, rather than it being the piece of paper. If the police suspect any fraud, they check back in the database - which is much harder to forge than a piece of paper. It also means that when applying for an annual road tax disc, for which proof of insurance and MOT is needed, it can be done online rather than requiring the local post office who issues the tax disc to check the insurance and MOT forms - apply online, giving your credit card, the system checks your registration in the insurance and MOT databases and the new tax disc arrives by post a few days later - nice and easy.

I think most MOT failures are not regarded as a reason for immediately grounding a car. Obviously there will be some things which will be reason for condemning a car immediately, but in many cases you are allowed to carry on driving until the current MOT runs out - and you can get your car tested up to (I think) a month before the expiry of the certificate, which gives you leeway to get the faults fixed when it's convenient. But if you take the car away rather than getting the testing garage to fix it, you pay for it to be re-tested.

I'm surprised that some counties and/or states in the US don't do emissions tests, because I'd always thought that emissions tests and standards were pioneered there. Certainly US cars required catalytic converters on all new cars a long long time before they became mandatory here in the UK.

I'd guess that emissions tests in the U.S. are the exception rather than the rule. Same for so-called safety inspections. In Arizona only two counties require emissions tests and there is no safety inspection. Except for the DOT (and perhaps EPA) standards for vehicles, there is no country-wide standard or testing for much of anything regarding cars & trucks...it's mostly up to the states. Ditto for most other things as well (education, voting rules, etc.).

On the original topic of this thread...I believe Honda is planning to offer a Diesel engine in 2010, in the Accord, I think.

He may have been referring to the lifetime rather than the (pretty much unquestioned) ability to keep up the pace on a single trip. (Stereotypically, diesels thrive on steady-state highway operation.) Some people have been speculating that the smaller of the new-breed automotive diesels, more lightly constructed and more heavily turbocharged, might not last as long as the heavily built older units a la the Benz, or the big ones that you find these days in a great many full-sized American pickup trucks. I guess time will tell.

(Really big vehicles, with not much proportional penalty for a little extra mass or cost in the engine compartment, are a whole different breed of Cat, or Cummins, or whatever. As an example, a heavy truck that isn't driven improperly, or badly undermatched to load and terrain, or poorly maintained will sometimes go a few to several hundred thousand miles between relatively minor in-vehicle overhauls and something approaching a million miles between major out-of-vehicle overhauls. Most railway locomotives in the US are diesel-electric, and at an even further extreme, in a lot of cargo ships you find diesels that make many tens of thousands of horsepower and are less an engine than a Gothic cathedral of internal combustion. There is no question that you can make diesels that do the hardest sorts of work for a very long time -- the question is the longevity tradeoff for making them comparable to gasoline engines meant for small cars in throttle response and in ratio of power to size/weight.)

As for the cost of diesel fuel in the US, here's what the government Energy Information Agency says:

In short, diesel is a more important transportation fuel worldwide than it used to be. Besides aviation fuel and off-highway uses (shipping, railroads, mining, agriculture, warfare...) heating oil is, at least regionally in the US, an example of a fairly direct competitor, as refiners decide how much of what to make out of the reasonably dieselworthy fractions of crude oil.

The oil market being global, it's also well worth noting that in most of our lifetimes, the population of the US has doubled and that of the world has tripled. (During the portion of that period from the advent if the SUV fad at start of the oil price trough, circa 1985, to the present, the US has gone from 235 to 303 million and world population rose from an estimated 4.85 to 6.6 billion.) This explains a lot of things, especially energy markets.

Obviously most of those people are not going to live and consume like an American or even like a fairly "green" European, but many of them

*are* consuming more energy in various forms, including (personally or at one remove) petroleum. World energy consumption has gone from 308 to 463 "quads" (quadrillion BTU) in that same past-quarter-century timeframe, and per capita consumption has gone from 63.7 to 71.8 million BTU in the same period -- a reminder that in very broad terms, a technological society's economic progress may be measured in its energy use. (How efficiently and responsibly they obtain and use that energy is a different issue.)

Getting back to the earlier question: Thinking back to the false start of passenger-car diesels in the US also brings a specific tax issue into play. I seem to recall the early 1980s as when the Federal tax rate on highway diesel leapfrogged that of gasoline. (Diesel fuels meant for different uses get different dyes indicating their tax status, and you can get into a heap of trouble for getting caught with the wrong one in your car or truck.) This sticks in my mind because of where I lived at the time, and news articles about whether it was or wasn't worthwhile to duck into Mexico and tank up. Looks as though the actual year was 1984 and the tax gap is sometimes called the "diesel differential":

and Cheers,

--Joe

Yeah, it occurred to me about a second after posting that that's a silly thing to say about a diesel, but You Know What I Mean -- the second-cup-of-coffee term would be something like "responsiveness."

Wishing you all a meaningful seasonal observance appropriate to your cultural heritage and belief system,

--Joe

About a year or so ago a lady friend whom lives in England got a new Fiat Grande Punto car.She didn't say if it has a diesel engine, but I think it is a diesel.She said she can push a button (or flip a lever) and the car will shift gears automatically or she can shift the gears manually.A few months ago she said she leaned on the steering wheel and the car talked to her.She said she will have to read the operators manual.She really likes that car. cuhulin

On 12/23/2008 5:04 PM Mortimer ignored two million years of human evolution to write:

The requirements vary *wildly* from state to state.

Some states have no inspections at all, except for emissions testing in built-up urbanized areas. Washington state has no overall vehicle inspection requirements; emissions inspections are done only every two years in urbanized areas, Seattle and surrounding regions being the most obvious. Cars older than a certain age are exempt from emissions testing. Yes, you read that correctly: if your car is an old polluter built in 1965, but still running all right, there are no inspection or emissions requirements of any kind.

Oregon state is similar.

On 12/23/2008 6:27 AM Nate Nagel ignored two million years of human evolution to write:

Citroen was able to sell a very few SM models in the USA. Peugeot and Fiat had the reliability problems, true, and the Japanese manufacturers simply ate their lunch. Pity too; current-generation vehicles from these makers are better in several ways, and modern Citroens aren't bad at all.

"Mortimer" kirjoitti viestissä news:XuKdnXtlxrHNwM snipped-for-privacy@posted.plusnet...

I doubt too that there would be an EU-wide standard for that. Here in Finland people consider our tests most stringent in the EU. I believe it's among the most stringent ones but still probably not the most stringent. Of course, people whose cars have got failed in an annual inspection keep grumbling how in _any_ other EU member state their car would've passed with no problems...

However, I know there _are_ differences in accepting imported (outside of Europe) vehicles first time to be registered for road use. In Finland it seems to be often outright impossible to get accepted a car or truck imported e.g. from US. I don't have first-hand experience about this but I believe the problem is that the inspection offices here would require some certificates that only exist for vehicles that have been sold in Europe originally by manufacturer.

The solution? People simply have their imported vehicles first registered in e.g. Sweden. And once a vehicle has been found to be road legal in one member state, every member state will have to accept it in the condition in which it was accepted in the first one. It seems that in several other member states procedures exist to find out if a car or its component despite lacking certificates still meets the requirements, but in Finland officials are afraid to make their own decisions as one day some of them might turn out to be bad ones.

P.V.

Honestly, these "safety" inspections are mostly just another tax, since for private vehicles, probably less than 1% of accidents result from mechanical failure.

Heavy trucks are a bit different in that the professional drivers are usually better, and the trucks log a lot more miles than a passenger car. Even there, mechanical failures probably account for a single digit percentage of accidents, with driver exhaustion and accidents caused by passenger cars doing stupid things accounting for most accidents.

This afternoon, I think that married Irish woman wayyyyyy over yonder across the big pond in Bognor Regis,England got unpizzed off enough at me, because she emailed me twice.I asked her if she is still driving that Fiat Punto car and does it have a diesel engine?

Later,,,,, no telling when she might decide to tell me. cuhulin

What really happened to Rudolph Diesel? Inventor of the Diesel Engine. I once read many years ago, he disapperead from a Ship from New York to Europe. cuhulin

easy: