Reply #16: We should be looking at diesel, not hybrids [View All]

[Vulture]

Diesel is the obvious near-term solution, for a number of reasons.

1.) Diesel, is substantially more fuel efficient than gas motors in general. They are also more reliable and last nearly forever (the typical designed life cycle of consumer diesel engines is in the ballpark of 500k miles).

2.) Diesel can deliver the same fuel efficiency as gas-hybrid while being a far more elegant and mature engineering solution. It also performs much better on the road under a broader range of conditions, and in many environments will substantially outperform the current crop of hybrids in terms of fuel efficiency.

But the really important one is this:

3.) There is FAR more diesel grade crude in the world and in North America in particular than there is gasoline grade crude. Not all crude is created equal, and not all of it can be used to manufacture gasoline. As a result, different regions of the world trade crude with other regions to get the crude fractions that they need -- the small amount of crude we import from the middle east (~15%) is to boost the gasoline fraction. If we primarily used modern diesel engines in our vehicles rather than gasoline engines, we would have all the crude fraction we need right here in our hemisphere. The Americas have gobs of crude that is great for making diesel but useless for making gas. It would also put all that crappy Russian crude to good use (a similar situation).