With diesel sales in some European markets now topping 70 per cent, Honda just had to get in to the act. As the world's largest engine manufacturer, its only diesel offerings were through joint-ventures with Rover and more recently Isuzu.
However, after 2½ years of development Honda has leaped from nowhere to produce one of the most competitive diesel engines we have driven for some time. The new Accord diesel impresses on three fronts.
First is performance - with a 0-62 mph of 9.3 seconds and top speed of 130 mph, it comes in with a better acceleration than its two-litre petrol sibling. What's more, with 340 Newton metres of torque, it has more pulling power than the 2.4-litre version. That's the sort of pulling power to let you pull away in third gear, and accelerate from 40 mph to 70 mph while in fifth without threatening to stall.
In fact, we found we could happily nip around some very tight back roads in north Co Dublin while staying ifourth gear. And all the time, it made little or no identifying rattle that usually tells you it's a diesel.
That's the second point: noise. Being a petrol-driven car firm for years, Honda engineers were given the unenviable task of creating a diesel model with petrol acoustics.
While that's the Holy Grail in engineering, Honda is certainly on the right track and to our untrained ear on a windy Monday morning it certainly seems to be on a par, if not superior to, its main German competitors, the BMW 320d and the Audi A4.
The third, and most important element is price. Coming with Honda's Executive specification - which features leather seats, alloy wheels among the standard features - the new 2.2-litre common-rail turbodiesel is priced at €39,835.
To put that in perspective, that's only €2,540 more than the two-litre petrol equivalent. Yet it offers a very impressive 52.3 mpg, the sort of figure you'd more commonly associate with a supermini.
Honda's sales and marketing director Frank Kennedy outlined the future of diesel in Honda. Next year will see this engine feature in the CR-V, with plans for a European production plant in 2006, probably in Swindon.
For now the engine will be built in Japan exclusively for the European market. With a short run of 15,000 for this year, Irish sales are expected to be 130, but having spent some time behind the wheel, we suspect they could sell much more.