Over 46 years ago, General Motors launched its answer to high fuel prices and the need for greater fuel economy. The Oldsmobile diesel V8 was supposed to usher in a new era, but it was such a flop that many believe it damaged the reputation of diesel passenger cars for decades. That’s especially sad because the improved diesel engine that came immediately after did a far better job of delivering the benefits promised by diesel power.
But then, just when things were getting good, GM gave up. If GM had begun its diesel-car journey with the Oldsmobile 4.3 diesel, things would have almost surely gone very differently for The General. Unfortunately, GM fixed the problems just in time for sales to fall off a cliff, then canceled the whole project, hoping you’d just forget about the whole thing.
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Forever Living In Infamy
It could be argued those old-school diesels shouldn’t have had such a bad reputation. Sure, the Oldsmobile diesel V8 was a blunder, but GM still managed to control the vast majority of the diesel car market and managed to sell hundreds of thousands of diesel cars per year. But as you’re about to read, sales don’t always translate to happy customers.
We’ve written about why the Oldsmobile diesel V8 was such a headache, but if you didn’t read Lewin’s story, I’ll quote a snippet:
Oldsmobile engineers decided to start with what they knew, and based their work on the existing Oldsmobile 350 cubic-inch V8. It was this decision that played a role in the failures to come. That’s because a diesel engine typically runs at a far higher compression ratio than a typical gasoline engine. A gas engine might run at somewhere between 8:1 and 12:1, while diesels typically run from 14:1 to 22:1. This is mostly because gas engines are desperately trying to avoid compression ignition of the fuel, while diesel engines rely on that same effect.
The engine’s designers took this into account to some degree, designing a reinforced block for the diesel application. Other changes included hardened camshafts, larger main bearings, and tougher, thicker connecting rods and piston pins.
For all that the engineers did, they didn’t go far enough. The diesel engine’s heads used the same head bolts and 10-bolt pattern as the gas engine. This decision was made to allow the diesel engine and gasoline engine to share some of the same tooling. However, it meant that the head bolts were extremely overstressed in the diesel application. They were more than capable of handling the cylinder pressures of a gasoline engine, but they couldn’t take the additional strain of the high-compression Oldsmobile diesel design, which ran at a lofty 22.5:1. The design really needed more head bolts, and likely stronger ones too, but budget concerns won the day.
The Oldsmobile diesel V8 had a knack for stretching or snapping its head bolts, leading to blown head gaskets at best or hydrolocking from coolant ingestion at worst. If your Oldsmobile diesel V8 didn’t blow its head, it could have also lost its injectors and internals to corrosion since Oldsmobile neglected to add a water separator to ensure your diesel fuel didn’t have water contamination. Yet, if you somehow lucked out on both counts, maybe the timing chain would stretch out.
The Oldsmobile diesel V8 was so infamously unreliable that it wasn’t certified for sale in California. Normally, something like this would happen because of emissions. In this case, it’s because all nine of the Olds diesel-equipped cars failed to complete the state’s emissions testing program. Every test vehicle had engine issues while seven of the vehicles had additional transmission issues on top of their bad engines.
If you’re scratching your head about how engineers could make such a garbage engine, you should know that reportedly, it wasn’t really their fault. As the New York Times reported, Olds diesel engineer Darrel R. Sand tried to blow the whistle and his efforts were allegedly met by getting fired. How bad did things get? That New York Times article from 1983 opens like this:
Peter and Diane Halferty paid $20,000 for a diesel-powered Cadillac Seville in 1979. Within three years, the General Motors Corporation replaced the diesel engine twice under warranty and rebuilt the transmission once, also under warranty. Just after the warranty expired, the third engine burned out and the Halfertys, two land developers in Seattle, were faced with a $4,500 repair bill.
Mr. Halferty, who said he has spent $18,000 keeping his car on the road, finally, in exasperation, put a classified ad in a local paper last year. It read: ”Has your G.M. diesel auto engine failed? Ours has, let’s take action, call Pete…”
In short order, 200 people called the Halfertys and a new activist group was born: Consumers Against General Motors. ”G.M. told us we had an isolated problem, but we knew it was an epidemic,” said Mr. Halferty, who, along with his wife, gave up paid work to organize the relatively well-off group of irate consumers and assist other groups in about 14 states to tackle the nation’s No.1 auto maker.
Other issues with the Olds diesel included failing injectors that fouled the glow plugs, flat tappets that wore too quickly, and leaky Stanadyne injection pumps.
In the end, some 10,000 people across 14 states demanded a uniform redress program from GM while others launched three class-action suits. How did it get this crazy? While the Oldsmobile diesel was notorious from the start, people kept buying them, anyway. General Motors owned the diesel car market in the early 1980s. In 1981, the peak of sales, GM sold 310,000 diesel cars, accounting for 60 percent of the diesel car market.
I wouldn’t fault you for thinking that this is where the story of the Oldsmobile diesel V8 ended. But GM actually managed to evolve this engine into something worth having in a car. General Motors then sold so many diesel cars that Volkswagen’s 2013 numbers were comparatively peanuts.
Giving It Another Shot
Many historical perspectives on GM’s sadder moments in diesel history end after describing how bad the Oldsmobile 5.7-liter diesel was, but General Motors didn’t give up on the project.
As the New York Times wrote in 1983, complaints about the reliability of the Oldsmobile diesel V8 fell sharply in 1981. General Motors had the correct response to the initial disaster by tackling the weaknesses of the Olds diesel. Engineers redesigned the diesel’s heads, used stronger bolts, and changed to a different head gasket material. The injection pumps got new collars and the glow plugs got better, too. These upgraded engines, identified with “350 DX” on their blocks, didn’t suffer from nearly as many failures as the earlier engines.
Here’s a MotorWeek review of an Oldsmobile 98 Regency with this engine and John Davis noted quality improvements and good fuel economy:
However, it could be argued that it came too late. The original engine was on the market for about three calendar years before GM finally released the upgraded version. So, even though the Oldsmobile 5.7-liter diesel V8 was no longer a migraine inducer, buyers started losing interest. In 1982, diesel sales fell by 43 percent, with the New York Times citing the fact that diesel was now more expensive than gasoline, the cars themselves were more expensive, and GM now had a bad reputation.
Yet, General Motors still wasn’t ready to quit. The firm had two more diesels in the pipeline, both with a stated 4.3 liters of displacement. One was the 4.3-liter Oldsmobile diesel V8, which was just the 5.7 with smaller bores. That mill was a weak 90 HP unit that sold for just a year in the Oldsmobile Cutlass Salon, Cutlass Supreme, and Cutlass Calais. The year 1982 saw the introduction of the other 4.3, and it was a much better start than the former two.
This 4.3 was better but didn’t really get a chance to shine. As Diesel World writes, a common belief is that the Oldsmobile 4.3-liter diesel V6 was probably based on the 4.3-liter Chevrolet V6. Normally, such a notion would be silly, but remember, Oldsmobile did use a gas engine’s architecture to make the 5.7 diesel.
This time, it did appear that GM did learn its lesson. The 4.3-liter Oldsmobile diesel V6 has the same bore and stroke as the 5.7-liter diesel V8 and the two engines even shared many parts, but the V6 diesel’s crankshaft had 30-degree offsets between the crankshaft throws to account for the V6’s firing order. The V6 diesel even used a Stanadyne DB injection pump like its bigger sibling. Autoweek notes that this engine was pretty much a 5.7 with two cylinders chopped off.
Before you get concerned, GM’s basis for the 4.3-liter diesel V6 was the vastly improved 5.7 diesel V8, which meant that the 4.3 was never known for the catastrophic issues that plagued the original 5.7s. Versions of the 4.3-liter diesel V6 would end up in 12 models across the GM portfolio from the Cadillac Fleetwood to the Chevrolet Malibu.
In a vacuum, it seemed the diesel was a great choice, too. Sure, there were only 85 ponies in the stable, but torque was decent at 165 lb-ft. If you equipped a Chevy Caprice Wagon with the 4.3 diesel, Chevy said you’d get up to 33 mpg on the highway under the EPA’s old testing regimen. That was good for an astounding 726 miles of highway range, provided you never exceeded the speed limit.
Oldsmobile said its engine was this efficient because the new diesels had a venturi-shaped pre-chamber design for a cleaner fuel burn. Low blow-by pistons were used to quiet down the engine, the air intake manifolds were aluminum, the engine had an electric fuel pump, and Olds also claimed higher fuel economy thanks in part to roller valve lifters.
How was it on the road? Well, here’s MotorWeek again:
Davis found that the 4.3 diesel had great performance for a diesel and was only slightly slower than an equivalent gasoline car. Ironically, the car was a bit of a pile, but per Davis, the engine was actually flawless. Instead, the car had a near-total electrical failure and when the car did work, the automatic load leveling system basically had a mind of its own.
A Bit Too Late
Davis noted that things weren’t working out for diesel cars by the mid-1980s. The price of diesel fuel rose higher than that of premium gasoline and now that the country had moved on from the Malaise Era, fewer people obsessed about getting super high fuel economy.
But Oldsmobile was still all-in on the diesel thing. Reportedly, it even began work on a wild V5 variant of its diesel.
Autoweek noted that by now, the diesels were getting only eight percent better fuel economy than cars with a significantly cheaper Iron Duke, so there were even fewer reasons to buy in. Then, of course, GM couldn’t escape the reputation it made for itself in the late ’70s. Sales continued to slide and in 1984, stricter emissions meant GM couldn’t sell diesels in California.
General Motors finally threw in the towel on its diesel passenger car program in 1985 and wouldn’t sell a diesel car to Americans again until the Chevy Cruze diesel nearly three decades later.
It’s hard to say what could have happened if General Motors didn’t cancel the project. It seems like GM made a fine diesel engine, but it took far too long for that engine to materialize. Davis said that by 1984, diesel cars accounted for less than four percent of all cars sold in America.
However, anyone who has been alive long enough knows that cheap gas prices and good times don’t last forever. Europe carved out a niche in America selling diesel cars, eventually emerging as market leaders when diesel caught on again. In 2014, Volkswagen sold 95,823 TDI “Clean Diesel” cars in America, which accounted for a full 23.5 percent of Volkswagen of America’s sales that year. That’s right, nearly a quarter of all VWs sold in America in the early 2010s were diesels. Then, Dieselgate happened and now diesels have largely faded back to being the propulsion for big trucks and equipment.
I can’t help but wonder what might have happened if GM hadn’t given up for nearly three decades, but I suppose the answer to that question is irrelevant now. The Dieselgate scandal and the shift toward EVs are slowly ensuring diesel remains a technology resigned for big equipment. At the very least, if you want to rock one of these cars today you’re unlikely to pay a lot for one.
Meanwhile, Mercedes Benz, had been making diesel cars since at least the early 1960s and by the 1980s they were pretty sophisticated — the the Italians beat the lot with common rail electronic injection.
Politicians in Europe starting to regret their recent rejection of diesel — they consistently produce 20% less CO2 than petrol (gas) cars, and usually beat hybrids too.
The reduced CO2 emissions were a major cause of the diesel wave that took Europe in the early aughts.
The high smog (NOx emissions), along with Dieselgate, took the shine off of diesels very quickly.
Funny thing with the Nox, is that petrol (gas) cars are no angels either — and the difference between some new petrol engines and new diesels (with their AdBlue tech in place and not bypassed) is tiny…
NOx emissions are certainly higher with diesel, and DEF does mitigate the issue.
VW looked like heros (and presented themselves as such) meeting NOx targets with no DEF, but of course it was all a scam.
Other manufacturers, even those using DEF, have been implicated in similar scandals. They do this to meet performance and economy targets.
It all leads to a mistrust of the technology as a whole.
I agree that they are doing much better now, but there’s always a part of me that wonders if maybe when you’re at WOT on the highway, all that emissions stuff is digitally bypassed.
The world’s first diesel passenger car to be in a regular production was Mercedes-Benz 260 D, introduced in 1936. So, that’s about thirty years earlier than you wrote.
No, common rail direct injection (CDI) technology has been around since 1910s and used mostly in the trains and heavy vehicles with diesel engines. You got it other way around about the Italians: the Swiss researchers came up with the concept of electrically-driven CDI, which Magneti Marelli based its development on. Fiat, the parent company, didn’t have the funding to refine the technology so Bosch took over and did the further work, readying it for the market.
Many of diesel engines for the passenger vehicles weren’t that sophisticated. They had indirect fuel injection, prechamber, glow plugs, mechanical fuel delivery system, and like. Then, the 1993 introduction of diesel engine with four valves per cylinder head (Mercedes-Benz OM604) and 1995 introduction of CDI changed the whole equation for the diesel engines. Those and ultra-low sulfur diesel fuel (mandated by Sweden in 1990, starting at 50 ppm and going down to 2–5 ppm) and much improved diesel particulate filter in the 2000s.
Mercedes-Benz introduced the world’s first diesel particulate filter for the passenger car in 1985: 300 D that was earmarked for Californian market. However, the technology was a dismal failure and abandoned for a long time until the better technology came along in the 2000s.
So…
They were early. I remember the round Mecedes 190 (I think) models, still going in the mid 70s, with 15 years or so on the clock.
Same time, mid 70s, and possibly even 1960s, Peugeot had diesels for its 404 and 403 pick ups. Some still running in parts of Africa….
PS funny thing about the Nox too, they are now realising, (head slap) that petrol (gas) engines are no angels about it too, and most modern diesels, if they have their anti-pollution gear in place, are better than some new petrol models…
Oh yeah, the LS2 😀
It was so good that GM named a modern V8 after it 😛
Sometimes I wish I could buy one of those, just to make a YT video titled “LS2 powered” [shitty 80s GM car] and it be a stock diesel LOL
“Autoweek notes that this engine was pretty much a 5.7 with two cylinders chopped off.”
In other words, it *was* based on the gas 4.3 then, since the GM 4.3 engine is just the 5.7 with two cylinders lopped off
The 4.3 V6 that was in production until recently was a Chevy small block with two cylinders cut off. The Olds diesel 4.3 was an Old V8 with two cylinders cut off. Same concept, but different engine architecture.
It’s not often you see the Iron Duke as the more attractive option. Its output at the time was comparable, down a bit on torque but it weighed less than the diesel so you got some of the oomph back just by throwing a couple of anvils overboard.
And pokey though it was, Dukes are damn near unkillable. They resist flogging at every turn, demanding that you settle down, junior. You’ll get there. And by golly, you do…
…eventually.
If you want to go fast and have reliability, put a turbo’d Iron Duke into a Triumph Spitfire. Indy pace cars using this engine in the 1980s, with turbo added, were making around 250 horses.
That “Duke” you’re talking about was not the Duke that was screwed into the regular cars. The Super Duty 4 block was a Duke in architecture but much stronger. Turbo a Duke much past 175 and you’re close to the limits of what the block can deliver reliably. I think if you ask for much more than about 200 you’re getting ready to blow the head.
The Super Duty 4 that went into special purpose vehicles like the pace car can bore and stroke out beyond three liters displacement – bigger than the stablemate 2.8 V6 – and reliably deliver over 300 hp depending on the tuning. And they turbo very, very well.
Thank you. I didn’t know this.
175 horsepower is still decent for a lump of that sort.
“Only Olds offers advanced design diesel V8s in 19 different models”
Pam Beesly: “It’s the same model”
I’ve told many stories about our Olds Diesel, and frankly, the GM diesel experience was so bad, that ANY diesel was out of the question. Some of the other favorite diesel memories from that era:
The plug should hang out from the front grill on a proper northern state block heater install.
Nothing GM did in 1980 regarding diesels was proper…
On my Colorado diesel, the block heater plug comes out from the hood right at the base of the driver’s side A pillar. Factory location, I’m assuming so people don’t forget that it’s plugged in and drive away. I think it works pretty good, tucks under the hood just enough that it doesn’t get covered in road grime / salt and it’s easy to get to.
“There was a soot circle about 10″ in diameter at the rear of the car, as the exhaust was aimed out the side of the car near the bumper.”
It’s even bad in Europe in the past when many lorries have exhaust pipes pointing out of the side at the knee or waist level rather than upward over the cargo box. When we travelled with cars in Europe during the 1970s and 1980s, we had to keep windows on driver’s side closed all the time so we don’t get sooted as the lorries drove past us in the opposite direction.
We drove many times on the Bundesstraße 31 over the Black Forest between Freiburg im Breisgau and Titisee before turning south to Waldshut-Tiengen. That road had many switchbacks, including that famous Kreuzfelsenkurve (keyhole-shaped switchback, sharpest in Germany), and steep climbs. My father would yell at us who sit on the passenger side to roll up windows quickly before overtaking the slower lorries.
You can easily spot which vehicle had crude diesel engine: one side is already darkened by the soot. Sometimes, the taillamp, bumper, and paint area above the exhaust pipe got irreversibly darker and darker over the time…
The thing that leaps out to me is that
in 1984 Peugeot was getting similar horsepower to the GM 4.3 out of the XUD 4 cylinder diesels which had a very good reputation in the 205 and various other PSA cars
Detroit Diesel and EMD could make excellent heavy diesels but General Motors couldn’t engineer a decent light duty engine because of the classic Malaise Era GM mixture of ambition and penny pinching that created the Vega, the A body fixed rear windows, and the X body
My friend’s grandmother had a Canary Yellow Delta 88 (I think) Diesel with a white landau top and black velour interior. The color combo was crazy even back then. It was like being inside a velvet painting. I’ve never seen another and even the interwebs can find no trace of it.
GM rushed something, screwed it up, then only belatedly and too late fixed it so they just gave up??? Well I never!!! *clutches pearls*
Modern emissions requirements make diesels absolutely pointless other than for the MOST heavy-duty uses. Between the up-front costs, the cost of diesel being rather higher than gasoline most of the time (right now in my area it’s almost a buck a gallon more), the toll that modern emissions take on diesel fuel economy, and the *extreme* cost of repairing them, the cost advantage is gone – and they sure don’t have a performance advantage in anything but the heaviest of heavy hauling over a modern gasoline engine. In the case of VWs, the 1.4T has basically the same performance and economy as the “fixed” TDIs on cheaper fuel with less maintenance and upfront cost. A cat for a gas car is expensive to replace, but God help you if you need to replace the diesel equivalents. Which like to fail early and often, especially if your use case isn’t LONG highway drives all the time.
I enjoyed a number of diesels back in the day, from ’70s Peugeots and Mercedes to my first new car, an ’01 Golf TDI, but no interest at all today. I wouldn’t even buy a new enough diesel that it requires DEF for heavy-duty use, based on my cousin’s experiences as the fleet manager for our hometown. He doesn’t even buy diesel school buses and dump trucks anymore.
Diesels are a dead end, IMHO. Where that kind of torque and efficiency is needed, a heavy-duty gas hybrid (or PHEV) can do it.
I agree for passenger vehicles. For heavy haul, the added complexity and resulting increase in cost and likely decrease in reliability probably isn’t worth it until emissions regs force it to happen. But I am talking semis, not pickup trucks. Pure EV can make sense for local trucks that go home every night, but I expect the vast majority to be diesel for a long time yet, absent a real breakthrough in battery tech.
Another big advantage of diesels for construction equipment is that it can sit FOREVER without causing the fuel system issues that gasoline does, even in modern diesels. Even if they can’t sit for 30 years and fire right up like the old ones do.
I am an idiot when it comes to all this theoretical stuff on engines. But there is an article out today about a new train in Chile that runs off a hydrogen fuel cell and batteries . Would this qualify as a heavy haul? And could this setup kill the need for diesel in semis and construction equipment? Thanks.
Most trains as I understand it today are electric with a diesel generator. Check out Edison motors, they’re doing the same with trucks.
Railroad locomotives are not diesel electric for efficiency, because using an ICE to generate electricity to turn an electric motor is NOT more efficient by itself. But it is the only *reliable* way to get up to 6000hp to the rails while tugging a million tons of freight along, and it allows for very simple and easy multiple unit operation. The Europeans long figured out that diesel-mechanical was more efficient (usually with a torque converter or fluid coupling drive), and a couple of US railroads bought them as experiments in the 60s and 70s when fuel got expensive, but in much higher tonnage slow speed US freight service the reliability was HORRENDOUS.
What Edison is doing differently is using batteries – those trucks are battery-ICE series hybrids, the usual diesel-electric locomotive is NOT. So they are able to use a smaller, more efficient ICE and use the battery and electric motor as a booster when needed, and then do regenerative braking when the power isn’t needed, or even run just on battery alone at times. That SHOULD work out well in a truck if they can make it reliable. Also, note that the market they are going for is NOT interstate highway-based long-haul trucking, but logging and other shorthaul but heavy-duty “vocational” applications where the power demand is more far sporadic than hauling along steadily at 65mph all day.
So far, though they certainly have tried, no locomotive manufacturer has managed to make a battery-hybrid locomotive that was successful. The problem is that rail is so efficient to start with that the added capital and maintenance cost of the more complex locomotive outweighs the operating cost savings. And the battery needed to make it work is *massive*, and very, very, very expensive. It’s one of those ideas that sounds wonderful in theory but so far just hasn’t worked in the real world, because it already takes relatively little fuel to move massive amounts of cargo with steel wheels on steel rail. VERY different than the economics of a truck.
Another thing the locomotive makers have tried is “genset” locomotives. Instead of one massive 3000hp prime mover, they have six 500hp engines with separate generators that can be turned on and off as HP needs change. That has also been a failure for the same reason – the savings in fuel doesn’t outweigh the increase in acquisition and maintenance costs. It’s pretty much always been cheaper to just use an older locomotive that is too tired for mainline use for the uses where those genset locomotives made sense, even if it used a lot more fuel. So they ended up being extremely niche, for places that have very, very stringent noise and emissions regulations.
Maybe? The problem with hydrogen is making the stuff. There are two ways to get it – you either split water, or you split natural gas. Both take a TON of electricity to do, so unless you have a source of really, really, really cheap electricity, the economics are even worse than just making batteries for an EV and using the electricity directly to charge them. Or in the case of natural gas – just burn it directly in an ICE, as you end up with about the same amount of pollution either way, just in different places. But given a good hydrogen supply, the fuel tank for a fuel cell “charges” a whole lot faster than a battery does, so there is that advantage, and you can probably fit a bigger hydrogen tank for more range than you can a battery. Different pluses and minuses.
I assume Chile, being a mountainous country has a ton of hydro-electric power, so electricity may be cheap enough to make the economics work there. Certainly fuel cells themselves are a well-proven technology at this point.
The article is: https://www.ecoticias.com/en/china-hydrogen-train-history-futuristic/8976/ They don’t burn the hydrogen to make electricity, some “electrochemical ” process that doesn’t produce anything but water as waste. I think the US has lots of desert settings to install solar cells or those mirrors pointing at a tower to create the hydrogen gas. Then use natural gas pipelines to transport gas tofilling stations. But I don’t have the intricate knowledge to know if that is even feasible.
I never said they burn it, they use electrolysis to separate water into oxygen and hydrogen, or they can separate it from natural gas using other processes, then the fuel cell uses a catalyst to use it to make electricity with water as a byproduct. Though BMW DID make regulare ICE engines that ran on hydrogen – another dead end.
BOTH production methods require vast amounts of electricity. The cost of the electricity makes hydrogen a non-starter when you add the infrastructure needed to store and transmit it. And storing and transmitting hydrogen SUCKS. You might as well just make batteries and use the electricity directly, it’s more efficient and at this point, cheaper. And then there is the cost of the hydrogen fuel cells themselves. About the only advantage hydrogen has is it’s somewhat faster to fill a hydrogen tank than charge a battery. It’s a non-starter, as Toyota have proven. The cost of the infrastructure for hydrogen makes EV chargers look cheap. And you sure as hell are never filling your hydrogen car in your own garage -high pressure hydrogen is just way too dangerous, which is a seriously legit advantage of battery-electrics.
Thank you. You’re more understandable than Googling it. You should edit Wikipedia for us engineering challenged!
As they say, it’s better to be handy than handsome. Happy to help. My font of useless trivia comes in handy occasionally.
Agreed. Dieselgate has, if anything, kept the idea of consumer diesel alive as a what-if. The real story is less that Volkswagen cheated than it is that Volkswagen couldn’t make the cars it wanted to without cheating. One might even muse that we’ll see the story repeat a few times, perhaps with a Toyota or Honda, as the science around emissions intersects the companies least willing to poke at EV tech
Indeed, it wasn’t that VW couldn’t meet emissions standards, it’s that they couldn’t do it across the board with the cost, economy, and performance goals that they had that made the upcharge for a TDI worth it to the consumer.
IMHO, electricity is going to be a growing part of the market, to a point, but it will never be the whole automobile market absent government regulations cramming EVs down everyone’s driveways. Which as I have said, will probably happen in some of the world, but is seriously unlikely to happen in the US. If they work for you at the current technology level, good for you! They don’t for me, and plenty of other people.
The real solution to very many issues is make personal vehicles expensive enough to use to make people actually THINK about their life choices around their use. Emissions are FAR from the only bad effect that cars are having on the planet.
We’ve already seen some cheating from other manufacturers. Hyundai and others have gotten fined for exaggerated mileage numbers. Tighter and tighter emissions along with self-policing will lead to more fudged numbers.
So do away with the self-policing. But something will have to give if there is a real societal interest in this. And it’s ultimately going to cost the consumer more one way or another. The US barely gives lip-service to climate change as it is. Regulating supply without doing much of anything to influence demand is exactly how we went for mostly reasonably efficient cars to slightly more efficient in some ways CUVs that would be WAY more efficient if they weren’t CUVs. And the stupidity that is 9000lb electric Hummers and pickup trucks.
For those die hard compression ignition fans pilot ignition ICE exists:
https://dieselnet.com/tech/engine_natural-gas.php
Its my understanding these engines (when done properly) offer all the power and torque of the same engine running on pure diesel fuel but with far lower emissions and fuel costs. Its even possible to modify existing diesel engines and run them up to about an 80 NG/20 Diesel mix.
Sure, you can run pretty much any ICE on natural gas. It’s very common in Europe, especially in The Netherlands. I have driven from Amsterdam to Paris in my buddies NG duel-fuel Volvo 740. Most stations have pumps for it. REALLY common for buses here in the US, and all the trash trucks in my county are NG-powered (and hybrids!).
The big drawback are the fuel tanks. To get decent range, they have to be MASSIVE, and they are very heavy. For trucks and buses that don’t go far and return to the same home base every night, it works well. My buddy’s Volvo had a tank filling up the space where the spare tire would normally go and it would go ~100 miles on a fill of NG IIRC. But when NG is less than half the price of gasoline (and in 2012 gas there was ~$10/gal), stopping more often isn’t that big of a deal, and he had a short commute. Even Amsterdam to Paris is only 300 miles. IIRC we stopped once and refilled with NG, then did the rest of the trip on gasoline when it ran out.
Here in the US the price difference is not as extreme, but it’s good enough for trucks). But given the Russian NG situation, I suspect that NG in Europe is probably no longer nearly as attractive as it was back then. I’ll have to ask him.
NG has about 3x the energy content of H2 by volume at the same pressure and temperature and is a LOT cheaper, already has a well established transport infrastructure across much of the developed world (including home delivery into millions of homes albeit at low pressure), has vast natural reserves all over the earth and is even renewable. Any storage tanks developed for compressed hydrogen ala Toyota Mirai or various hydrogen powered trucks should work even better for CNG while allowing far greater range.
Whats not to love?
OK there’s that half glass empty nasty GHG argument. Its true methane is a strong GHG
BUT
I say a lot of that natural gas off landfills, compost, animal waste and whatnot is going to be created anyway – isn’t it better to put that to useful work and convert it into more climate friendly CO2 than let it go into the air? After all NG is where 95% of hydrogen comes from and its a lot less efficient to make hydrogen out of it than to just burn the natural gas directly.
Here in the US the price difference is not as extreme
Isn’t it? When was the last time anyone paid YOU to take diesel off their hands?
https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insights/latest-news/natural-gas/082124-negative-permian-gas-prices-set-record-stretch-as-matterhorn-startup-looms
It’s a great solution for the right use cases, given the right economics (as with pretty much every solution). Hydrogen is very much a dead end, IMHO, unless you have access to *incredibly* cheap electricity to produce it, and even then it’s basically just a worse battery.
I certainly agree that we should recover as much of it as possible and use it! IIRC, that is exactly what my county does, though I don’t think it really provides much of what the trucks use every year. But better some than none.
Hydrogen is very much a dead end, IMHO, unless you have access to *incredibly* cheap electricity to produce it, and even then it’s basically just a worse battery.
IMHO its even worse than that.
Therefore you need to use ALL of whatever is made from renewable energy to displace that NG generated hydrogen earmarked for industry otherwise you’re just fooling yourself. That leaves nothing for transport until industry needs are satiated. How much hydrogen is that? My rough guesstimate says the energy content of the world’s industrial hydrogen needs is about the same as the entire renewable energy production of the United States including all hydro power.
That’s because it’s cheaper to make it from natural gas. If you have tons of cheap electricity, water electrolysis would make sense. But it makes making aluminum seem “energy efficient”. But it’s just a bad idea for a whole host of reasons.
There’s a reason why Ford finally reintroduced simple big displacement pushrod gas V8s for super duty trucks. Diesels are just too big of a pain for a lot of fleets.
Exactly. The gas engines use more fuel for sure – but gas is cheaper than diesel, but the engine is a LOT cheaper to buy, the maintenance and repairs are fraction of the cost and they are more reliable. It costs a lot of money to have an expensive truck or bus in the repair shop instead of out doing it’s job.
That, and the modular engines were just continually outdone by the GM V8s. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em – they did the same in the early ’80s with the Essex V6 (the North American Essex, not that wacky British thing). It’s basically a copy of the Buick 231, right down to its 232 cubic inch displacement.
My cousin bought a couple buses with the Ford V10 (the first gassers in 30 years), and it was fine – but the V8s are better, and that’s all he’s buying now other than he keeps two diesel pushers in the fleet to use for sports teams and field trips. They actually do enough highway miles to keep the emissions systems happy. Want to piss off a modern diesel? Put it in a school bus in a town that is only about two dozen square miles in size.
That’s a perfect use case for an EV school bus. I remember choking on emissions as a kid on the school bus in the early ’80s.
So do I, and only about half of those emissions were from the crappy cafeteria food.
He looked into those, loves the idea. But it’s the same issue – they cost too damned much. Even with Federal incentives. And the cost for the charging infrastructure was a complete and utter non-starter. And electricity in Maine is *stupidly* expensive, thanks deregulation. The buses just don’t do enough miles for it to make any kind of sense. Too few is as bad as too many for EVs. And the school districts in Maine (and the city of Portland) who did buy some electric buses to test were severely unhappy with the reliability of them.
Amusing story around that – Florida Light and Power actually owns most of the electricity generation in Maine, Central Maine Power having been forced to sell it off and become JUST an electricity distributor when the deregulation mania took hold. So you DO have a choice of electron providers. But the reality is that the choice is between the expensive “standard offers”, boutique “green energy” providers that are WAY more expensive, and a company that offers the sort of variable pricing that utterly screwed people in Texas and Minnesota a few years ago when that crazy cold snap happened. No thanks. So we take the “standard offer”. I live in SW FL most of the time, so my provider down here is FLP as well. And the electrons cost about the same amount in both places per kw/h. Difference is, FLP delivers them FOR FREE in FL, but in Maine my tenants get to pay CMP for that to the tune of about 150% of the cost of the electrons they are delivering. Nice. If I still payed the bill up there the garage roof would be covered in solar panels, but since I don’t there is no reason for me to do it, and they can’t afford to do it. The next owner’s dilemma, along with a lot of other things with that house.
But certainly a modern gas-engined Ford Bluebird is nothing like the smog-belching oil-burning groaning Cornbinders of our youth. And I am old enough that as a kid they all burned LEADED gas before the town went all-in on diesels when I was in middle school. IIRC I am a bit older than you are, being a 1969 model.
Yeah, you’ve got a head start, I’m a malaise era model.
There are places where it was well executed and makes sense. There’s always those early attempts that sort of splatter.
I did not realize there were places that don’t charge the exorbitant transmission and delivery fees like we pay here in New England for power. Interesting. I mean, everything is expensive here, so whatever.
I wonder how much of the rollout of EV stuff is tainted now by politics and expectations that the hardware can’t possibly deliver on out of the gate.
I dunno, electricity, water, sewer, and Internet, seem like basic utilities that everyone needs that should be very carefully and fully regulated. There should be NO profit motive involved in any of them. Plus education and healthcare. And insurance. But I guess I have turned into a pinko-commie-liberal in my old age.
Getting out of New England was the best financial decision I have ever made. Florida is FAR from perfect, but it’s good enough, and FL winters are nicer than New England summers. I would be perfectly happy to never see snow again, but inevitable work makes me go North all winter, given there isn’t much US that is South of here.
Unfortunately, this story shows how reputation killed Chevrolet/GMC, and IT DID NOT HELP that the rules and restrictions got them as well…
Same thing today, except under Mary B with her useless decisions, but generally other CEOs too have taken a hit (Mr Akio with his scandal , Farley with QC and etc)…
GM performed a spectacular decade and a half worth of self immolation that threw sparks well into this century.
The Corvair is probably unfairly counted here. It was more of a case of outsized ambition than inadequate execution. That car is an engineering masterpiece, but not the elegantly simple car the market was hungry for in 1960. That turned out to be the Falcon; almost cynical in its McNamara-directed austerity approach. In the middle was the Valiant.
Corvair SHOULD have taught GM to be a little smarter and not try to reinvent the entire fucking wheel, especially when gunning for the entry-level market.
But no.
The Vega was an absolute saga of infighting, hubris, engineering miscalculation, and self-inflicted wounds driven by underbaked technology. From the aluminum engine blocks to undersized cooling systems to Vertipak shipping, there’s fantastic ideas contained in the Vega, but obscured by embarassingly bad build quality, weird decisions for cost cutting (no glovebox originally?), and it was so bad that Vega disappeared by what would have normally be a mid-cycle refresh (it became the Monza, still kind of a piece of crap).
Then GM went all-in on front-wheel drive. They created a ton of ballyhoo about the X-cars, and sent “ringers” out to the press for previews. New engines, platforms, transaxles, and structures were all cooked up. They kinda had to be. And then they dinged themselves so hard with cost cutting that they had to recall the cars due to a hazardous braking issue, engine problems, quality control, and more. Again, by the mid-cycle refresh, they renamed the Citation to Citation II as a way to say “no, really, it’s good this time.”
At the same time, they decided to do their diesel programs.
The V8-6-4, which was a great idea let down by its pairing with carburetion and the slow microprocessors of the time, which necessitated careful admustment and maintenance by dealer mechanics who were probably not inclined to like or understand a thing that was a constant thorn in their side that lost them money on book time.
Then the HT4100 with its aluminum block and iron heads.
They spent a bundle on a Wankel that they killed, too, that was supposed to power the Vega originally. (And the AMC Pacer, which became collateral damage).
The J-cars were better, but launched without a good engine and still had refinement issues at a time when the VW Rabbit was mopping the floor with them, Ford had its original Fiesta, and then the Escort, and even Chrysler had the Omni, which was executed better.
They finally fixed the X-Bodies, mostly, and replaced the RWD A-Bodies (re-naming the old RWD A-bodies as G-Bodies, which were scaled-down ’70s cars, terrible to work on, okay-ish to drive, but didn’t have stuff like window mechanisms in the rear doors, and yet still managed to be popular).
The GM-10 was supposed to be their “we did it right this time” effort that went hugely over budget and came late, so Ford got the jump on GM with their Taurus. The Lumina and its derivatives had a whole new set of problems, but were less of a faceplant than the X-cars.
And on.
And on.
There are successes in there I didn’t mention. It wasn’t all terrible, but holy crap, when you look at the pattern of getting high off their own supply, it’s just absolutely breathtaking.
And in light of all that, they had the gall to call the stupid little ‘GM’ Emblem “The Mark Of Excellence”
https://cdn-fastly.thetruthaboutcars.com/media/2022/07/10/8980029/gm-mark-of-excellence-rip.jpg?size=720×845&nocrop=1
That stupid program where they added those stupid little emblems across all GM cars was a clear example of the cognitive dissonance in the upper ranks of GM.
Plus, in my view, it ran counter to the efforts of each brand having its own identity.
If I were to pick an emblem that was a “mark of excellence”, I’d pick the Lexus emblem.
Yeah, this was a classic move from the bankruptcy watch era. Used to call it the Mark of Excrement.
That was a Lutz thing (I think he explains it in Car Guys vs. Beancounters) – but basically to re-establish the GM reputation across brands. I don’t recall the exact passage.
Say what you will about the guy, but I think the Lutz influence had a positive outcome for GM.
Yeah, if people were happy with their car purchase, or saw something in the parking lot that they liked, he wanted them to notice that little chrome Chiclet on the fender and go, huh, GM makes that, maybe their stock is undervalued after all
Other than the EV-1 and maybe GMC (though with a different logo and initialism), GM hasn’t really put their name on customer facing products, which was an issue that Nissan, American Motors, and British Leyland all wrestled with at different points
“Yeah, if people were happy with their car purchase, or saw something in the parking lot that they liked, he wanted them to notice that little chrome Chiclet on the fender and go, huh, GM makes that, maybe their stock is undervalued after all”
However on the other side, if they were UNhappy with their car purchase or heard stories of others that were unhappy, then it they might think ‘no way in hell am I buying stock in a company that makes POSes like this’.
And that stupid emblem on a Cadillac? “Hmmm… I thought Cadillac was supposed to be a premium brand… but it’s just another GM product like this Chevy. I’ll take a pass and buy a REAL luxury car like this Audi”
Yep, that was the blowback, but this was the period where they were turning off escalators at GM Rennaisance Center and removing trash cans from cubicles and private offices in order to reduce janitorial staff, they were kind of flailing around for ideas
In his first stint at GM, I’m sure he was great. It led to him having a great reputation and many wanted to hire him.
But on his second stint at GM that started in 2001, I think he caused more harm that helped.
For a car guy who should also have known the importance of trying to establish the unique perception of each brand, he should have known that sticking that stupid GM emblem was a stupid idea… especially on Cadillacs.
And that wasn’t his only stupid idea that he got implemented when at GM. The Kappa vehicle program wasn’t good for GM either. Financially, it was actually terrible. And the Pontiac GTO and Pontiac G8 were also financially TERRIBLE for GM
So I don’t think Lutz was that great for GM.
I watched him get interviewed in the early 2010s and in that interview, he argued that a common 4 cyl engine should be made for all car makers to use ‘because they’re all about the same’… and when I saw that, my reaction was ‘WTF???’
Even I know what that wouldn’t be feasible. Just look at the differences between GM’s 4 cyl engines and the 4 cyl engines in a Subaru.
Sidenote: Let’s not overlook the Saabarus that he was responsible for… indicating he also didn’t ‘get’ Saab and also had no idea what to do there.
I also was left with the impression that he thought that the Chevy Volt was comparable to what Tesla was selling… “It’s electric, so that should be good enough”
And for the longest time, his subsequent interviews clearly showed he did not get the appeal of Teslas and I think barely understood the appeal of hybrids.
In essence, my impression was that while he may have been a “car guy”, he was the “V8 engines for everything” narrow-minded type of “car guy”.
And his ideas of what to do were based on the past, not looking at what was coming down the pipe in the future.
And thus, my view is that by around 2010, Lutz was well past his best-before date for quite a while.
Even with the Volt, which was probably his best idea, was the tech in that car designed in a way that it could be easily transferred to other models on other platforms?
No it wasn’t.
From a technical and design basis, the Volt looked to me like an evolution of the GM EV1 hybrid prototypes they worked on before that other “car guy” Rick Wagoner cancelled the program and ordered that all EV1s be recalled and needlessly crushed.
That powertrain, as good as it was, was only used on a small number of other models.
And in light of Toyota’s success with the Prius and hybrids, did the new GM Zeta platform have any provision for a hybrid option?
It didn’t.
Neither did the Alpha program that came right after.
And that lack of planning and foresight is why GM, Stellantis and others had to buy emissions credits from Tesla for many years in spite of beforewarned years ahead of time that tighter fuel economy/CO2 emissions standards would be coming.
And Lutz was around for the conception and development of those programs.
Too much looking backward and not enough looking forward… and not taking planned future tightening emissions standards seriously enough.
I would say it is because they ONLY had experience building muscle cars, trucks and SUVs and commercial heavy duty equipment. I would say certain cars such as Caprice Classic were better than all the turds you mentioned, but again, this depends on the powerplant.
Ford of that era- Burning Pintos, Exploders, and so on , so on. They made decent products as well, but they too were NOT without issues.
So, the Pinto exploding thing – they weren’t nitroglycerine, they would often puncture their fuel tanks and catch fire in certain kinds of collisions. That was another example of Dr. Strangelove level actuarial absurdity (“it’s cheaper to settle lawsuits that happen when people are harmed or die than it would be to make the car more safe”) – twisted.
The Pinto did a lot better than the Vega – its launch advertising campaign is fascinating, too; they clearly studied the DDB work for Volkswagen.
At least the Vega never had a reputation for killing someone UNLESS for a few cases given the turd it was…unlike the Pinto lawsuit…
I consider that.
My family was very much a GM family in that era other than a couple of Subarus bought in 1980 and 1982 (the ’82 becoming my first car). They really were breathtakingly terrible cars. And trucks too in many ways. The old man never bought another GM product after being burned about four times in a row on an ’85 Olds 98, a pickup and a couple of Suburbans (diesels, but the engines never had any issues, it was everything around them).
The Subarus never gave ANY mechanical trouble, but just dissolved in Maine salt, so that experiment was not repeated either.
Their quality went down in the 80s. Oddly enough, the trucks and SUVs of that era I still SEE here in Qatar and they still exist in the Middle East…
You don’t salt the roads in the Middle East. They are all but extinct in the northern half of the US, at least ones that didn’t migrate there recently. The mechanicals do stumble on for a lot longer than the chassis and bodies do.
Yes. I think it is also people not undercoating or protecting them from rust as well. I remember the Toyota products – their trucks and SUVs also had similar issues, and the Hilux even now has. I guarantee if the LC70 were sold in the rust belt- it would have suffered the same issue as that of the Tacoma…
Well, rust affected other brands as well, such as Ford. I read an article about it….and also, Fords that vintage are not so common in Qatar as GMC/Chevrolet products of that time.
Undercoating beyond what the factory does is often counterproductive. Once it is compromised, and it will be, it just traps salt even more. The best you can do is try to keep the thing clean, but that is almost a lost cause as well in a Maine winter. It’s usually too cold for carwashes to operate when you really need them to, and the constant freeze/thaw keeps the roads covered in salt and salty water. Thankfully, Maine doesn’t use some of the liquid ice melting solutions that other states use – those are even worse for rotting out cars than rock salt is. They are sticky, get EVERYWHERE and don’t wash off as easily.
Everything from that era rusts badly other than the Germans and Swedes – and the Germans (especially Mercedes) backslid badly when they went to “greener” materials in the late 90s. Took them about a decade to figure that out and going back to being more rust-resistant than anything else.
The Land Cruisers that were sold here absolutely dissolved, just like every other Japanese car. For a personal perspective, my folks bought a pair of Subarus, in 1980 and 1982 – neither of them lasted more than 6-7 years before being junked for rust. The first one needed the sills welded before it’s third birthday. In contrast, my ’84 VW Jetta GLI managed to go nearly 20 years before the tinworm got it.
I really don’t buy the theory that the trashtastic GM V8 diesels did much to kill off diesels in the US. they just didn’t sell enough of them to really matter, and there were so many other diesels of the era that were just fine. Emissions regs were a far bigger factor. none of the very happy owners of Mercedes and VW diesels cared in the slightest what GM did. The Europeans kept building them for a while, then started again once they figured out to meet emissions with them, and they never stopped being available in emissions-exempt pickups.
VW and Mercedes both brought back diesels in the early 90s with some success. But the problem is gasoline engines had moved on so much too that you really had to have a need for what diesel brought to the table. By then few wanted a rough, slow, and loud diesel luxury car, even if by the standards of the old ones they were miraculous. The TDI was a success largely because the entry-level VW 2.slo gas I4 in the A3 and A4 was so terrible that the TDI was a delight in comparison for not much more money, and the 1.8T was both rather more expensive and a lot less efficient.
Kind of ironic given that the whole reason the W123 Mercedes was ONLY sold as a diesel in the US was because none of the I4s and small I6s they used in those cars would meet US emissions and CAFE standards without being totally neutered in performance. They put the effort into the V8s for the SL and S-class because the V8s were big enough to survive the hit with SOME performance left. And even then, the US market was almost the ONLY place that W116 and W126 S-class turbodiesels were ever sold (a few went to Japan, oddly enough), to help meet CAFE requirements in the US, and I assume something similar in Japan.
GM also built diesel Chevettes from 1982-85 with rock-solid-reliable (bought in, Japanese-made) Isuzu diesels.
S10s too, if I’m not mistaken.
There are enough ‘what might have happened if’ in GM’s history to write a couple of books worth of analyses.
And then there were the $500 starters and two batteries…
Didn’t all the GM V6s get offset crank throws by the early ’80s?
The 3800 is based on the BOP 215 V8. The 4.3 gas V6 was a cut-down small block, and that sounds like exactly what the diesel was, too.
Pretty sure they were developed under Oldsmobile because of divisional warfare, care and feeding, and production capacity.
Offset crank pins are not a “feature” to brag about, as it were. They inevitably and drastically weaken the crankshaft. Of course, this can be mitigated by beefing up the journal sizes, as well as applying special design measures like rolled fillet radii and special heat treatment. A V8 would need no such feature and would balance better overall than a 90-degree V6. The Olds 4.3 V8 Diesel, if it applied all the design improvements of the latest iteration engines, could have done very well with just the application of a turbocharged to improve on the otherwise anemic performance.
Noting my screen name, I lament the decline of Diesels in passenger cars. My maniacal obsession to maximize efficiency made me a Diesel fan early on (although as a child I initially hated but later appreciated the first Diesel in our household, a 1982 Datsun Maxima). My obsession led me to a Masters degree in mechanical engineering (earned in Germany), and then a PhD in the same. Notwithstanding the apparent sunsetting of the internal combustion engines in favour of electricification and maybe fuel cells, I am now working on a unique engine design that goes back to the first principles of thermodynamics to achieve the highest efficiencies ever seen in any engine designed and built (not a theoretical construct like Carnot’s).
Many of us hope you succeed in your mission!
Very curious to hear more about what you’re coming up with. First-principles engineering can often lead to dead ends and “oh, *that’s* why they did that” but sometimes it can lead to brilliance like the Britten V1000.
Thanks to both you and Brian Richardson for the positive words. Here’s the link to a presentation I gave in 2022 with the thermodynamic explanation.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/371081422_The_Potential_of_2-Stroke_H2DI_Engines_Toward_Decarbonisation_and_Zero_Emissions_Current_State_and_Future_Opportunities
In brief, the First Law of Thermodyamics demonstrates that the efficiency of an engine is related to its compression ratio and the specific heat ratio. Everyone knows the first and everyone has played with that, including researching what happens if you raise the CR to the order of 100:1, but much less the second, although I am by no means the first or the only one to take engines breathing air out of the equation.
My scientific contribution was to find a novel way to reduce wall heat transfer losses in a hydrogen-fuelled engine by about half in my PhD dissertation, and in subsequent research, I also show that from a Second Law perspective, certain combinations of fuels and working gases reduce the combustion exergy destruction. Again, I’m not the first or only one to realize this, but AFAIK, I’m the only one specifically doing something to capitalize on both these thermodynamic properties simultaneously and have a startup developing on this IP. Your idea is on much more solid ground if your theory is supported by the First and (more difficult) Second Laws.
Naturally, technology like this will not likely find its way into passenger cars, but I’m looking into places where ICEs are pretty safe for the foreseeable future like large engines for power generation / energy storage, marine, and rail applications.
Are you seriously proposing an ICE that replaces atmospheric nitrogen with argon?! If so I sure hope you’ve got a cost and energy efficient plan for scrubbing out that nitrogen as well as recovering the $$$ argon from the exhaust, otherwise I fear your running costs will kill you and your well to wheel efficiency will go into the toilet.
For that matter why use argon at all? Why not just a charge of hydrogen and denitrogened air (or oxygen). If you need an inert gas how about steam? You’ll have plenty of that around.
The presentation explains all you are asking. I determined how much it will cost from an efficiency standpoint. If I separate the air into its component gases to get argon, I will reduce my system efficiency by about 5-6 points. But if I can get 65-70% efficiency out of this engine and lose 5 points, I’m still getting far and away better efficiency than anything out there (60-65%).
The argon is recirculated in a closed loop, not simply exhausted. There is no exhaust pipe in the usual sense; just a condenser like in any steam turbine powerplant. The argon supply is used to make up for any that gets lost due to blowby, leakage, purging operations, and contamination beyond reasonable recovery.
The presentation explains all you are asking.
Not really. If does I didn’t find it save the diagram which in which I did find an argon recovery path. However that diagram shows only pure O2 injected, nothing about how that O2 is purified from the air. How do you plan to separate the air? Condensation? Molecular Sieve? Magic?
Nor is the presentation clear to me on costs or argon recovery efficiency. Argon ain’t cheap and as a consumable it will need to be included in the cost even if its to say a negligible amount is lost. Maybe compare it to the cost of urea in a diesel exhaust treatment.
Speaking of which I think if you are serious about commercializing this tech you should lead your presentation with low costs, simplicity, a wide range of operating conditions, reliability etc as well as thermal efficiency. Unless you can beat existing tech on most of those points (again only my humble opinion) this tech will be at best nothing more than an academic novelty. You’re up against existing ICE and gas turbines that are at least 50% TE, maybe more.
But if I can get 65-70% efficiency out of this engine and lose 5 points, I’m still getting far and away better efficiency than anything out there (60-65%).
Are you? Because its not just existing ICE and gas turbines you’re competing against but also fuel cells. It’s my understanding Bloom Energy and Toyota fuel cells already peak at 63% efficiency with a theoretical max of 83%. And neither of those require adulteration of the incoming air nor any argon in the loop to add complexity. Of course they have their own issues; how does your engine address their shortcomings without just substituting worse shortcomings of its own?
Finally I think hydrogen is going to be a very tough sell – even Toyota has to give it away to sell it. Once the free hydrogen is gone their Mirais are nearly worthless.
I apologize if I am coming across as brusque or aggressive. It was common for my fellow graduate students and I to rip each other’s work apart prior to a presentation so as to plug whatever holes we found and to toughen each other up, snark included. Had I been in your practices this would have been my feedback; however, I’m an outsider. Tthis isn’t my field so its possible what I perceive as holes are not in fact holes.
I just read your presentation.
I’ve co-authored papers with an author of one your references. Small world.
Cool – small world indeed! Are you at liberty to tell me who it is? I’d be pleased to connect with you regardless. tdimeister.com at geemail
Do you have an opinion on Casey Putsch’s Omega Sports car?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSaOolYYk8A
Not bad 🙂 My co-founder built this in the 80s:
https://forums.tdiclub.com/index.php?media/albums/87homebuilttdi.10539/
https://ecomodder.com/forum/showthread.php/what-spotted-rear-engine-tdi-custom-aero-body-26074-11.html#post378214
Nice! I knew I recognized that car as soon as I clicked the tdiclub link. I’ve seen it on ecomodder before. Didn’t know it was your cofounder who responded in that topic.
I’m an electrical engineer myself and am frustrated at the lack of affordable long-range EV options. A sub-$25,000, 250 mile range EV car, made with 1st world labor, is not rocket science, and would be easily done with a small battery pack by making the car’s platform and shape efficient to start with. Everything on the market makes at least 2x as much aero drag as it should and has 500+ lbs of extraneous features, most of which the operators will never use, all not because the consumer demands it, but to instead add cost/profit margin.
Something similar to what I describe above should have been available in the 1990s with NiMH batteries with the technology that existed then. What exists now is so much better than we had then, but all we can buy today in the EV space are luxury sedans and oversized CUV/SUV/trucks all costing $40,000+, or slightly less expensive 100-mile range city cars with crap aerodynamics that no one buys because their range sucks.
The Volkswagen “clean diesels” ended up not being so clean , they were breaking rules to get the cars to pass emissions tests. Volkswagen has been in hot water the past few years because of this.
I worked on a couple of these that were still around in the early 2000s. The conversation usually went “Hey you’re and Oldsmobile guy right?” Yeah, I’m familiar. “Cool, can you help me with this weird Olds my dad/grandpa/uncle sold me?”
Small point of order: the 260ci 4.3 liter V8 diesel (as opposed to the 262ci 4.3 liter V6 diesel) was only offered for 1979, and only on Oldsmobile A-bodies (Cutlass Supreme/Salon). The V8 4.3 had every one of the larger engines problems, plus the added issues of being even less powerful and less common. The V6 addressed almost all of the V8s issues – perhaps most importantly, 6-bolt heads instead of the inadequate 4-bolt originals – and they generally lived pretty long lives. You can still find them around, even though sales were miniscule when new. Would love to find a diesel FWD A-body in decent shape.
That does make some sense. The 260 gas engine wasnt particularly powerful either. If memory serves me right, the gas engine had smaller ports and only came with a 2bbl. By comparison you could only get the 307 with a quadrajet.
Great article. We need more John Davis. Is he dead? If not Autopian needs to reach out and interview him. Imagine what the car world would be like without too early released design or having bean counters given decision making power. Sure you need them to reign in engineers but not to make stupid decisions.
Not only is John Davis still alive, he’s still hosting MotorWeek!
Here’s his review of the 2024 Sonata posted just hours ago: https://youtu.be/taHcG9R3giw
MotorWeek is one of the first shows I ever remember watching as a car-obsessed kid, I have literally been watching him my entire life and I am not young. It was a sad day when we lost Pat Goss a few years ago and I don’t want to think about the fact that John is in his late 70s. The man is an icon.
Late 70s, but looks, at most, 20 years older than he did 43 years ago
I went to school in Baltimore and loved that the show would often film cars on the same roads my friends and I enjoyed on our motorcycles.
I got to meet John Davis in Chicago a couple of years ago! It was a dream come true and he’s every bit as sweet in real life as he is on video.
I remember that the Oldsmobile diesel short blocks were the basis for some powerful gasoline engine conversions, since you already had a very strong block, crankshaft, and connecting rods to start with. The crankshaft and rods are way too heavy for high RPMs, so sometimes just the block. I vaguely remember a how-to article in Hot Rod magazine.
That would be the GM DRCE, or better known as the Drag Racing Competition Engine. GM ruled NHRA Pro Stock in the ’90s, since the ‘corporate’ engine powered all the GM Pro stocks, whether they were Pontiacs , Oldses, or Chevies. The DRCE was based on the Olds 5.7 diesel block.
Interestingly, my now-deceased uncle John was a diesel mechanic for Stripling-Puckett, the Caterpillar dealer in Jackson, Mississippi in the ’80s. His service truck and my aunt’s Olds 98 were both equipped with the GM 5.7 diesel V8. The Olds had a chromed Cat diesel badge on the trunk lid…like that helped.LOL
What Oldsmobile didn’t learn until it was too late was that indirect-injection Diesel engines *really* benefit from forced induction, usually a turbocharger. Aside from the added costs, there is almost no downside to adding a turbo to an IDI engine.
Volkswagen did learn this… eventually. Early Rabbits and Dashers were slow as molasses, but the TDI really changed the game.
I don’t think anyone makes/sells a Diesel vehicle without a turbocharger these days, and there’s a reason.
A very valid reason. My famously thrifty grandparents drove their diesel Rabbit up to Virginia only *once* in the early 80s. Grandmother had white knuckles just talking about barely being able to maintain 40mph up the mountain on i77 among the semis
VW made turbodiesels LONG before the advent of the TDIs. You could get turbodiesels in the A1 and A2 Golf and Jetta, though Golf TDs were RARE. I nearly bought an ’83 A1 Jetta TD when I bought my ’84 Jetta GLI. They made Turbodiesel Quantums (Passat Mk2) for the US as well. Same engine. And of course, the MK1 Audi 5000 had a turbo 5cyl diesel available. And Volvo used the I6 turbodiesels from VW in the 760 and 740. All the same engine family, of course.
They also sold the goofy IDI turbo “EcoDiesel” that didn’t boost power (a whopping 52hp IIRC in 1992), but used the turbo and a very early diesel catalyst to clean up emissions for a couple years in the ’90s.
The TDI did up the game, but not as much as you might think power-wise (in the US at least, as we never got the full-fat versions), and largely because they were bigger – 1.9L vs. 1.6L. They were cleaner though, which was the real benefit, along with modern turbochargers that really helped with lag and response.
You’re correct, and I’d forgotten about the pre-TDI turbodiesels. But I’ll still stand on my point that non-turbo IDI Diesel engines just aren’t really taking advantage of what is possible.
Oh for sure, turbos and diesels are a match made in heaven. For that matter, they are the closest thing to a free lunch you can get with an ICE no matter what fuel. Power when you need it, economy when you don’t, especially with modern engine management and direct injection allowing for much, much higher compression ratios and efficiency than in the not-so-good old days.
This is what GM always did, launch a flawed, half baked product, let it hang out there for years, then finally fix it shortly before discontinuing it. Thankfully, the company currently called General Motors is completely different, right?
The chair recognizes the representative from Fiero.
The Corvair joins the discussion.
Cost killed the Corvair. The Chevy-II based Camaro was much, much cheapr to build and thus returned fatter profit.
I can believe it on the basis of the engine alone. I would guess sliding the jugs onto a crankcase loaded with a crank, rods and piston ons probably took 4x as long as building an inline, cast iron 6.
An engine they already had. That didn’t need all kinds of engineering to figure out how to cool that middle cylinder on each side.
I love the Corvair – it’s so creative and clever. It’s also fiddly as shit and the cost cutting screwed them. There was just no way they were ever going to pencil that thing out against the Falcon and then the Mustang.
Allante would like a word.
The Volt has entered the room.
An excellently engineered powertrain (that unfortunately required premium fuel in a car making its case on an economically low cost of operation), surrounded by a mediocre GM car. It deserved so much better. A bit too big to be much fun, a bit too small to haul a growing family.
The second generation took regular gas, and was surrounded by a much better, but still oddly sized and proportioned car. Discontinued before they even tried to put it in a more useful body.
“Name this famous GM product that launched with a flawed first generation, then was improved for its second generation before being abandoned.” would be a great trick question for an automotive trivia night.
Too easy. To many correct answers
No, the trick is that when someone says, “Ah, the FIero!” you go, “No, sorry, the answer was Corvair.” And if someone else answers Corvair as well, you go on to the next one, then the next one…
The Northstar has entered the chat. Seriously, the final generation Northstar FINALLY got the proper head bolts it should have had from the beginning. Sound familiar?
Yes. 2006 and up finally improved upon it…..
Exceptions such as the 3.8 and 350 V8, 454 V8 exist. Yes, they had their problems, but were NOWHERE near bad as the turd that was the V8-6-4, HT4100 and 5.7 Diesel…
And they sold the Buick V6 to Kaiser in 1967, because who wants an economy engine in the middle of a horsepower war? …and then bought it back from AMC in 1974 when they went “Oh crap, no one can buy gas anymore!” Talk about selling your umbrella when the sun is shining.
I think they had a bad management, and unfortunately today still have. Toyota had good management then- hence their successes despite the fact that their products rusted out easily, but Toyota of today is NOT that of yesterday…