A lot of baguettes were dropped in France a couple of weeks ago when the state decided that diesel, previously the apple in the eye for France, would now be an outlaw because it’s harmful for the environment. In America, diesel is a niche market at best and you have to drive a lot of miles to justify the increased cost of the car and the fuel. Really it seems diesel is something that is tolerated rather than actually wanted, despite the number of Audi, Volkswagen, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz offerings in the market. That’s at least if you only look at those markets.


In early December, the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, decided to shock the world and make members of the granola constituency happy by calling for a ban of diesel from the city by 2020. I’m guessing she’ll leave those pesky details of how to manage all the delivery vans, state cars, or indeed how she’ll get to the center herself. That’d be a nice headline “Mayor of Paris takes the train to work”.
Puzzlingly, instead of having a revolution everyone just shrugged and went about their business as if nothing had happened. Maybe they know that Ms. Hidalgo’s plans are about as likely to become true by 2020 as world peace. Interestingly, Boris Johnson, mayor of London and Top Gear target extraordinaire decided that it was a great idea and proceeded to look into the feasibility of a similar scheme for his people.

America is going the other way and at a considerably slower pace. The heyday of diesel was fueled along by clattery Mercedes oil burners in the late ‘70s and ‘80s. Then it was brought to a screeching halt by things like the hastily converted Oldsmobile 350. Diesel is picking up momentum at snail’s pace.
Offerings such as the VW Jetta TDI and the Jeep Grand Cherokee EcoDiesel, not to mention better placement for diesel at the pumps, are working at making the people trust in the fuel again. The current downward trend for fuel prices may put a dent to the progress as people move away from fuel economy and into bigger and thirstier cars, at least for a little while. It’s unknown if they’ll grow to regret their new vehicle choices when the powers that be make fuel prices increase once again.

Latin America seems to have found a happy middle ground between the Europeans new love-to-hate relationship and America’s diesel tax. In most countries south of the border, diesel makes perfect sense. Unlike in America where people up high noticed that diesel was a necessity you couldn’t get rid of and increased taxes accordingly, diesel is actually quite approachable here. Of all the fuels it’s the cheapest, going at around $3.37/gallon on my neck of the woods (People buying fuel at $1.99, count your blessings) and because there’s a very big sample of diesels, which mostly get promptly ignored in favor of bikes and pickup trucks, you can have all the benefits of diesel without having to pay through the nose.
On our favor are extremely lax emission regulations for automobiles, which I suspect is because the governments in Latin America are a tad tied up with other matters like getting their countries to work. That also means there are no government subsidies to buy hybrid/electric cars, so they’re extremely expensive. You won’t see anyone driving a Prius unless they’re:

1. Completely sold on the green movement and haven’t heard of things such as the BMW i3
2. Are on the board of at least one company.

Finally, because diesel is a necessity for heavy machinery it’s actually priced to be cheaper so that more people have access to it.  Not to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I think big government may actually have a bigger part of the blame for the decline of diesel in America than underpowered smoke machines from 30 years ago. It doesn’t make much sense to buy a car to save fuel if you have to drive more than 90,000 miles a year to start seeing some savings.

The only country where diesel doesn’t make sense is in Venezuela, and that’s because it’s an oil producing country run by people who are utterly insane and have priced fuel at $0.05/gallon. Cue lots of fuel trafficking and the country losing money hand over fist on subsidies, which they invariably blame on the U.S waging an “unfair battle” against plucky little Venezuela. Odd when you think most of their fuel is exported to the U.S. Let’s be honest here, all of us would be driving uber-engined cars if fuel were that cheap.
I now ask you, best and brightest, what will be the feature of diesel? Will it remain like it is now with the new pressure from lawmakers in Europe? Will it get a better foothold on the U.S?