Diesel Love Vs. Love Electric

Diesel Love

As you are probably well aware of now, I've been obsessing over Diesel engines recently since they are, in my personal opinion (and facts will back me up on this), the best small combustion engines you can have (efficient, powerful, reliable). To give you a little taste of diesels, here's a little comparison of Diesels with Gas powered engines* (sources vary the numbers):

	Gas	Diesel
Energy Efficiency rating	20%-30%	25%-45%
Energy Density of the Fuel	150k BTU/Gal	166k BTU/Gal
AVG DIST on Engine Lifetime	200k miles	350k miles
AVG Cost of 98 E320 Mercedes	$8k	$18k

*150k BTU/GAL for biodiesel and 100k BTU/GAL for ethanol (these are Imperial Gallons). Averages based on experience and personal research (the rest you can find anywhere online).

There is only a single disadvantage to diesels, and that's the Horsepower (the torque is far superior to gasoline engines though). This renders diesel engines poor for sports use (max speed is lower than for gasoline engines).

In short, the engine is amazing.

But wait, there's more. Diesels can run on biodiesel (here's info on why this the best thing since sliced bread - which I make). If you don't feel like reading that page, here's the gist of it: it reduces emissions, it is more efficient, it is easy to make and it can be made from algae (which thrives on CO2 and NO gases - filtering them).

'nough said.


Love Electric

Well, electric engines, are completely different from combustion engines; they are quiet, have a very high range of RPMs, can be easily repaired, have absolutely zero emissions and have a nearly flat torque and power curve (great for racing). The only issue is that the technology has not quite reached the level necessary to market it on a global scale and it requires the evolution of other technologies that have not yet been invented (fusion) in order to make it truly ecological and worthy of our use.

Hydrogen powered, fuel cell vehicles are conceptually great because they have all the benefits of electric engines but don't leach off the power grid directly enabling companies to manage their energy production more efficiently and give us the potential to evolve the technology. However, hydrogen storage is ridiculously expensive and very inefficient (tank takes up the space of an entire car trunk). This will take some time to be marketable.


Well, what I was getting to here, was that currently, we need to switch to biodiesel, 10 years from now, to electricity and then, finally to fuel cells thus allowing the petroleum companies to die slowly or adapt electricity as their main energy production (dropping crude oil).

So, hold on, I'm-a-coming - I'm jumping on the biodiesel wagon.