No More Thrifty Diesels for You
Thanks to Uncle, you can’t buy a new diesel-powered Volkswagen right now – and maybe never again.
VW has suspended sales of all its 2016 models powered by TDI (Turbo Direct Injection) diesel engines until they are “certified” by Uncle’s EPA, which may take awhile. Possibly, a long while.
So, until further notice:
No more Beetle TDI. No more Golf (or Golf Sportwagen TDI).
No more Jetta TDI.
Which means… no more affordable diesel-powered cars for you.
Period.
Because VW was the only car company selling diesel-powered cars that weren’t also expensive cars. And even if they are allowed to resume selling diesel-powered cars, they are going to be more expensive.
Because Uncle.
Until a couple months ago, you could have bought a 46 MPG-capable TDI-powered Jetta sedan for $21,460. This is less than the sticker price, incidentally, of a gas-engined/otherwise equivalent family sedan like a Toyota Camry ($23,070)… which tops out at just 35 MPG on the highway.
Then along came Uncle.
Cue Soup Nazi voice: No more diesels for you!
The only other diesel-powered passenger car you can buy right now that’s not well over $30,000 to start is the Chevy Cruze – which starts at $25,660.
That’s a lot less affordable than $21,460.
After it, you are looking at Audis and BMWs and Benzes – and while Mercedes, et al make some great diesel-powered cars, they are hardly economical cars. You buy them for their tremendous low-end torque and power, or for their highway legs (some can go 600-plus miles on one tank of fuel) or just because. But their high cost to buy makes whatever they save you on fuel an irrelevance.
But let’s go back to the Cruze for a moment. It passes muster with Uncle. But it costs $4,200 more than the Jetta TDI.
This disparity may well be what you might call The Cost of Uncle. What it takes – in terms of emissions rigmarole – to get a diesel-powered car engine “certified” by Uncle. The Cruze diesel must be fed DEF (Diesel Exhaust Fluid) which is basically urea, which is basically the same thing as “number one” (aka, yellow rain). DEF/urea is injected into the exhaust stream where a catalytic reaction occurs which reduces the final result at the tailpipe to within Uncle-acceptable parameters. But it requires a pretty complicated (read: expensive) exhaust system, as well as an injector system to spray the horse pee (DEF) into the exhaust and a separate tank (in addition to the fuel tank) to hold the urea.
Maybe they – the car companies – should put a line-item on the window sticker of their new cars that reads: Cost of Uncle.
It just might wake people up.
VW, meanwhile, is facing the possibility of having to retrofit the hundreds of thousands of “noncompliant” TDI-powered vehicles it sold with all of the above rigmarole, in order to placate Uncle. This could cost billions – and might not even be feasible, leaving aside the cost. Each car would have to be surgically altered (body panels cut, then repaired and repainted) in order to fit the urea tank and fill nozzle) and the exhaust system heavily modified.
VW is seriously considering buying back all the “noncompliant” cars and simply crushing them.
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