I have long sought a fuel efficient light duty diesel pickup. While we have some great trucks from the big three, they don’t make anything smaller than a 6L diesel. I hear Ford might make a 4.4L F150 but I won’t hold my breath from the big three. Jeep owners are still waiting for the export only diesel Jeeps to be sold here.
I pretty much fell in love with diesel Toyota HiLux and Ford Ranger crew cabs they have in Afghanistan.
So, I am happy to report that we may actually get something like this in the US. The Indian company Mahindra plans to sell their trucks here in the US. Check it out:
You can also sign up for a test drive when they become available in your area.
However, many diesel enthusiasts have been down this road before. The Romanian company AOR has been trying to bring the Cross Lander to America since 2006 http://www.nolimits4x4.com/options.html
What is a “common rail diesel”? How many different kind of diesel’s are there and is this one of the good ones? I don’t think the truck is really all that ugly as some have stated. I would buy one depending on the price. Is this a vehicle that I can expect to last ten years at a minimum with minimal repair costs?
I drove the Ford F150 turbodiesel - the powerplant is a Peugeot-Ford of
EUrope collaboration with increased stroke and is also found in Jag turbodiesels - and I genuinely liked the performance feel and the refinement of the prototype.
I don’t recall why we/they chose to abort; probably cost if had to guess.
One thing I always botched about was that we had no turbodiesel vehicles (like the EUropean Focus and use that same powerplant in the Ranger. “Wiser” heads prevailed and later did not protest EPA, CAFE, et ALS, when the current diesel emission regulations were proposed back in the late 90s/early 2000…
“Common Rail” refers to the fuel rail system where there is no fuel return system on the engine.
Yep, that is the problem all diesel enthusiasts face. All of these great products get pushed back for one reason or a another. Most major manufactures sell all sorts of great diesel products in Europe, but in our ‘capitalist’ society we can seem to be able to buy them no matter how much we beg.
Interesting, but I would prefer to see the diesel Hilux come here. They import them for retrofit by DoD and DoS, then export them to foreign service, but they will not import them for sale to consumers.
As we’ve discussed in the Gear Heads thread in the past, the US govt appears hell bent on destroying whatever benefit diesel may have had with regulation and corn subsidies, and frankly I don’t see the attraction to them I once did. If somebody proves me wrong I might be interested again.
Oh yes, there are many co-conspirators in trying to kill American diesel.
Bottom line, bio-diesel is the fuel of patriots.
The US could be the Saudi Arabia of soybean oil. Ethanol is a horrible fuel. On the energy conversion side, you have to put one unit of energy into it’s production to get two units out. And even with massive corn subsidies, we still have to import most of our ethanol from Brazil - who are cutting down the Amazon to grow sugar cane for ethanol so we can save the planet by using a renewable fuel. Thank you AlGore!
Bio-diesel (FAME - Fatty-acid Methyl Ester) returns 1:8. Of course, good old fashion petroleum returns 1:30 which is why we still use it!
Never the less, the US will not do a phase shift from the liquid motor fuel paradigm. We will still pump something into our cars for some time to come. For my money that should be diesel with gasoline being a more boutique fuel. We could go to B2 (2% bio-diesel mixed with petroleum diesel) tomorrow in the exact same way we went to ULSD (Ultra Low Sulfur Diesel). In five years we could go to B20 and so on with increases every five years or so to give the market time to adjust.
Navistar and Ford had a 4.5L V-6 Turbo Diesel ready to go at the same time as the 6.0L Navistar in 2003. Navistar built a new plant for the V-6, but Ford backed out and paid a large settlement.
Ford claimed it didn’t meet their requirements, but the “story” was that Ford marketing killed it because they figured it would siphon off higher margin sales of the 250/350 with the V-8 Powerstroke. When 70% of every 250/350 was getting a diesel, people appeared to be willing to pay the upcharge for the Super Duty truck AND the engine meaning more profits. Also, the F-150 would have needed some beefing up of the front end to support the weight of the diesel - so it would have been more like an “F-175”.
At this point, diesels just don’t make economic sense unless you NEED the torque. The addition of aftertreatment filters, EGR, and other emissions controls has driven up the cost and reduced fuel economy. Couple that with diesel fuel prices that are now equal to or higher than gas instead of cheaper as they were a few years ago and earlier and it’s a no-win situation. The extra cost of the engine is never paid back by the fuel savings. There is a durability argument, but the higher level of technology and complexity in new diesels means more things that can go wrong.
Remember that Europe does not currently require aftertreatment filtration on passenger cars - they went straight to SCR injection so they haven’t seen some of the cost increases yet.
That is changing with the Tier4i industrial engines requirements in Europe, US/Canada, and Japan. Starting in 2011, off-road diesels in all of these markets are phasing in aftertreatment filters and EGR just like the 2007 and later on-road engines in the US. The phase-in schedule depends on the hp rating of the engine.
While Biodiesel is laudable, it offers no economic advantage and thus will not drive the market the change unless it become a regulatory requirement.
I don’t know. I would have to see someone run the numbers to be sure. Diesel is more energy dense. You get more work out of a gallon of diesel. If you look at vehicles of the same type (like the VW Jetta or 06 Jeep Liberty) the diesel has better mileage.
Diesel is artificially more expensive here. By all rights, diesel should be cheaper because you get more product during the distillation process and it takes less energy to process. In Europe diesel is cheaper than petrol (or ‘benzine’).
The economic advantage of bio-diesel will come from not sending our dollars overseas to buy petroleum on the world spot market so some 27yo Shiek can gold plate his Rolls and make donations to his favorite madrasa in Pakistan.
Instead, that money would be reinvested in the US economy so Farmer John can buy a new US made Caterpillar tractor.
This is to say nothing of the cost savings in military spending. I look forward to the day when we can ignore the Middle East in the same way we ignore Africa.
I never really gave diesel much thought until Audi and Peugeot started dominating the past few years. Seems like the way to go instead of all this hybrid/electric crap.
Not when it is five to nine thousand dollars more expensive than a gasoline version. The current crop of diesels will not pay for the upgrade from gasoline within the standard ownership period (4 years @ 15k per year) when you look at TCO figures.
Don’t get me wrong I love diesels (most of the time) but the new ones are being pushed back into niche units due to the cost of the emissions systems.
yeah… the cost is high. those 80’s vw diesels were pretty successful and fairly priced. i guess i look at the diesel thing as government regulation fucking americans out of another positive thing. makes me want a diesel more haha
Mahindra dealers still waiting, pickups still not EPA approved
by Jeremy Korzeniewski (RSS feed) on Mar 29th 2010 at 5:32PM
According to Pawan Goenka, Mahindra’s president for global automotive, vehicle testing that would provide EPA approval for the Indian automaker’s upcoming diesel-powered, 30-mile-per-gallon pickup truck “is taking a bit longer than what we anticipated.” That, it would seem, is an understatement.
Mahindra first announced an expected mid-2009 sale date for the truck, which was later revised to end-of-2009, then February of 2010 and then finally March of 2010. You’ll notice that this Thursday the calendar turns the page to April, meaning Mahindra has missed yet another target date.
At this point, Mahindra does not yet have official approval from the EPA to sell its wares in the United States. The Indian automaker says it should take about a month for the paperwork to be completed (a timeframe not acknowledged by the EPA, naturally) and then dealers can finally place orders for the trucks. Considering that Mahindra’s vehicles will ship from India, it’s clear that there will still be some time before you’ll be able to stroll down to you nearest dealer and drive off in a new oil-burning bundle of joy.
That fact is not lost on Mahindra’s 300-plus dealers, some of whom have paid up to $200,000 in franchise fees and in some cases have been waiting for years to see their investment pay off. That said, nobody ever said that launching a completely new brand of vehicles in the U.S. was going to be easy, inexpensive or timely.
