Will Europe's love affair with diesel continue until the electric car's mooted takeover – or will petrol strike back, asks Shane O'Donoghue
DIESEL POWER is king today in Ireland. You can thank the Government’s decision in 2008 to change the rules on taxation to a CO2-based system for that. On one hand it’s been a successful transition, as buyers have had no problem moving to more fuel-efficient diesel models that also offer plenty of performance.
Theoretically the Greens should be happy that the incentive to drive economical models has resulted in more buyers reducing their CO2 output. Motorists know many of the larger-engined diesel cars would have cost a lot more to buy and tax before the changeover, and there’s the rub for the Government: earnings are down – even taking into account the slide in car sales since the start of the recession.
Diesel is a preference that is expressed mainly in Europe. Diesel cars have progressed significantly in the past decade, with high-pressure injection and advanced turbocharging allowing economy and performance gains. No longer is the diesel car seen as purely money-saving. But will Europe’s love affair with diesel continue until we are all supposedly driving electric cars in a few years’ time? Is petrol dead and buried?
There are a few fundamentals indicating that petrol power is far from extinct. The first is the economics of extracting a balance of diesel and petrol from crude oil. It’s a ratio that can not quickly or cheaply be altered, so if everyone wants diesel, its price will increase, while petrol prices drop.
Next is the subject of pollutants. While CO2 emissions are under scrutiny right now, they do not directly harm us when emitted from an exhaust pipe.
Other products of burning petrol or diesel do – such as carbon monoxide, oxides of nitrogen, unburned hydrocarbons and particulates. In this part of the world, diesel engines get off fairly lightly in the legislation, while petrol engines have much stricter limits on emissions. In some markets this is not the case, and hence the exhaust gases from diesel cars require more “after-treatment”. This is prohibitively expensive. When Europe adopts a similar stance – which it will – diesel engines may not make as much economic sense. It’s estimated that a turbodiesel engine and its exhaust after-treatment could cost as much as twice that of a comparable petrol engine after the Euro 6 emissions regulations come into force in 2014.
But we’ll all be in electric cars by then, right? Not necessarily. In purely scientific terms, electric cars make a lot of sense. In a utopian future, where all of our energy comes from renewable sources, it would seem more efficient to keep it in that form. Sadly, economic realities could prove a major stumbling block.
There seems to be an assumption that the car industry will make the electric car more affordable as it goes into mass production. Jamie Turner, chief engineer at Lotus Engineering Powertrain Research, dispels this myth: “The belief is that the car industry will, because of economies of scale, get the cost down. Well, we can’t, because most of the batteries use rare elements. As soon as you try to mass-produce something that is already expensive, it doesn’t get cheaper, it generally gets more expensive because you’re going to run out of material.”
Work will continue on more economically advantageous solutions, with range extenders one option. These require a smaller battery than a purely electric car (and hence less precious metal), but for now the conventional engine seems to be the only practical – and affordable – option.
So is the car doomed? Turner reckons there’s a potential saviour that does not require a steep change in technology or investment: alcohol-based fuels. He acknowledges we will never be able to produce enough ethanol to replace petrol and diesel usage, but says we should make as much of it sustainably as we can and then start looking into blending it with methanol, which can be made from a variety of sources.
“The thing that drives the whole process is people being able to afford vehicles and fuel, so you really need to stick with liquid fuels and cheap vehicles.”
The infrastructure is already in place to distribute a liquid fuel, while cars can quite easily be converted to run on a selection of fuels using existing technology. There are limitations and disadvantages, but it could be a pragmatic approach while we await a breakthrough that allows both sustainable and affordable transportation.
