Why is Europe so fond of diesels?

[Paul Nicholson]

At 7:52 AM -0700 2/10/01, Brad Wilson wrote:
>
>
>First, for Jon: go to your local VW dealership and drive a Jetta with a
>turbo diesel and see what you think about power, stink, noise, and pollution
>for yourself. If you're overcome with joy, start a campaign to AoA to have
>them bring the 1.9 TDI to the US for the A4 (that would be the path of least
>resistance, since the Jetta has the 1.9 TDI already).

I was in Romania last summer and one of our customers had a little Renault diesel, roughly the size of a Rabbit. I spent several hours in that car, riding around Bucharest and on the highways outside of town. It had lots of pep, and I couldn't tell that it was a diesel from riding in it.

There was no knocking sound to be heard in the passenger compartment and despite standing around many times as the care was idling as we all piled in, I was never hit with the diesel fume smell.

I was impressed.

We had a Belgium based service engineer there from a major Japanese graphics equipment manufacturer, and his company car back in Belgium was a diesel A4. He said the diesel ($2/gal) was half the cost of gasoline ($4/gal), and that the A4 held it's resale value so well that it cost the company little to use them for a while then replace them.

Paul