Diesel Dazzle

The New York City cabby was beaming. "It costs me about a third less to run this thing," he said. "I've already saved two hundred bucks."

His moneysaving (and -making) chariot is a Peugeot 504, powered by a diesel engine. At a list price of $8,260, the French-made Peugeot does not exactly qualify as low-priced. But the obvious economy of driving diesels is attracting more and more U.S. motorists: while diesel fuel costs about the same as gasoline, diesel engines get up to double the mileage. From 1974 to 1975, sales of diesel cars (mostly Peugeots and West German-made Mercedes) almost doubled in the U.S., rising to nearly 25,000 vehicles. Although sales this year are down, partly because of lower imports, Detroit has taken note of the new diesel dazzle. General Motors engineers are developing a diesel Oldsmobile that is scheduled to appear in 1978.

Various Types. Diesel engines, of course, have powered trucks, locomotives and buses in the U.S. for decades. But their use in cars is a relatively recent phenomenon. Patented in the 1890s by Rudolf Diesel, a brilliant German engineer who died in 1913, the engine, in its various types, burns almost any hydrocarbon: alcohol blends, benzene, kerosene, even lightweight heating oil. Rudolf Diesel himself fueled an early experimental model with powdered coal. Another advantage: diesels do away with the gasoline engine's frequently troublesome spark ignition system. Diesel fuel is injected into the cylinders and made to explode by compression.

In Europe, where gasoline sells for as much as $2.25 per gal. and diesel fuel is much cheaper, diesels account for 2.5% of auto sales. In the U.S., diesel-car sales have been held back by high prices (the cheapest Mercedes diesel lists for $10,278, not including options) and by the diesel's traditional drawbacks--low power, hard starting, loud noise and heavy weight. But auto engineers have a major incentive, besides economy, to work at overcoming these problems. Surprising though it may seem to anyone who has trailed a smoke-belch-ing diesel truck, diesels already meet federal antipollution standards. Those standards at present apply not to the quantity of smoke but to the amount of specific pollutants in it--though if diesels start hitting the market in large numbers federal standards on smoke per se are Inevitable.

The biggest stimulus to diesel sales in the U.S. could come from Volkswagen, the company that more than any other made frugal cars fashionable in the U.S. In what is being called a "second generation" of passenger-car diesels, VW claims to have solved most of the diesel's problems of weight and sluggishness. VW's first diesel, sold in Europe in the Golf model, accelerates to 50 m.p.h. in 11.5 sec., v. 10.5 sec. for the comparable gasoline-powered version (which is known in the U.S. as the Rabbit), and has a top speed of 87 m.p.h. Price: $4,000. VW plans to bring out a diesel Rabbit in the U.S. in 1977, when gasoline doubtless will cost even more than it does now.

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