I forgot to mention that Ford, GM and most auto manufacturers only charge between $0-1,200 for the diesel option in other countries. The price for the diesel option on imports here in the U.S. is still consistent with the price in other countries.

GM and Ford should pay attention!!!

A hybrid gasoline vehicle can produce less CO2 than a non-hybrid diesel in city driving, but not at higher speeds. The most efficient and environmentally sound solution, other than a totally electric or a fuel cell vehicle, would be a diesel hybrid. Unfortunately these would be very costly.

The higher mpg of a diesel vehicle is partially because the fuel has a higher energy content per volume than gasoline, and mainly because diesel engines use higher compression which is more efficient in combustion. The diesels can offer another advantage if they are able to run on bio-diesel.

To compare performance between a gasoline and diesel engine, you must use vehicles of the same weight, and compare acceleration. For the same performance, diesel engines will produce less horsepower, but much more torque and produce it at a lower rpm. To use this torque a diesel engine must be coupled to a Constantly Variable Transmission (CVT) or a transmission with more gears and use a differential with a higher gear ratio than a gasoline engine.

Diesels in North America are widely used for commercial, farm, and construction vehicles where their torque and fuel economy are needed. There were some popular diesel passenger vehicles sold here in the 80’s, but all of them were imports. The domestic auto manufacturers made some poor attempts to produce diesel passenger vehicles at that time using existing parts from gasoline vehicles. They had very poor performance and reliability. Many people have not forgotten this. If they had used parts designed for this purpose, and added a turbocharger for performance, this would have been avoided.

Volkswagen and Mercedes have been the main companies selling diesel cars here since then, and diesels have accounted for 50 percent of Volkswagen’s sales in some areas because the TDI’s got close to 50 mpg.

When the U.S. switched to Ultra Low Sulfur Diesel (ULSD) in October of 2006, there were some very strict emission standards that also went in to effect. The emissions must meet those for gasoline engines, and the exhaust system must last for the lifetime of the vehicle. This is much stricter than even European standards. It requires the exhaust system to be made of very expensive stainless steel. This meant that even the modern Common rail Direct Injection (CDI) diesels that have been sold world-wide for years now did not meet the U.S. requirements.

For those that are not familiar with modern CDI diesels, they use a higher injection pressure and computer controlled piezo-electric injectors that give multiple small bursts of fuel to a cylinder per combustion. This almost eliminates any knock associated with old diesel engines, gives better fuel efficiency, reduces emissions, and increases performance. They also use at least one turbocharger if not two, (a small one to spin up fast and give boost off the line, and a larger one to give boost at speed). The computer control also allows changing from a fuel efficient mode to a sport mode with a switch. They also use catalytic converters and other methods to reduce emissions. There is no big cloud of soot anymore.

So far, Mercedes has been the only company selling diesel passenger cars in the U.S. since the switch to ULSD. Volkswagen will start selling the Jetta Sportwagen in October 2008, which will get 45 mpg (US) City and 55 mpg (US) highway. Honda will follow by replacing the Accord Hybrid with a 52 mpg (US) Highway? diesel in the first quarter of 2009. Audi and BMW will also be offering cars in 2009.

Ford and GM have no plans to sell any of the diesel cars they sell to the rest of the World in North America. I have been asking them for years now, and would probably buy a Ford Mondeo diesel if they offered it.

I won’t place blame on anyone, but it is not totally with the North American consumer. Many are not aware of what Ford, GM, and other companies sell in the rest of the world. They have not been given the options available elsewhere.

I know there are many military people like me and others who have lived overseas that keep asking for diesels. We keep getting the same bullshit from the PR people at Ford and GM. They say there is no market for them here except for commercial vehicles. Then they charge $5,000 for that option.

These companies have been losing market share in North America for years because they would not even install variable valve timing in engines that were designed to use it. I have no sympathy for greed or stupidity in an otherwise intelligent people, ignorance is another thing entirely and can be overcome.

This story should outrage all of Florida and all the USA. Florida has some of the toughest drug laws in the country. I’ve seen our ridiculous drug policy cause tragedy, corruption, waste of resources, harm to citizens and society beyond imagination and once again needless death. There’s a growing movement to change this but we must all take action or tragedy will continue. Visit the site referenced below and get on their mailing list. Take civic actions that will make a difference when they notify you. Sending an email or making a phone call to your elected representatives can do more good than you might think. If not now, when? If not you, who? Enough is enough! “Just Say Know” is working on your behalf and they deserve your financial and civic action support. Just shaking your head and saying “that’s a shame” will not stop this.
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Note.. It would have been interesting to see just how good the Williams sisters could have been if they focused on tennis.

Anyone with half a brain should be able to say that if someone created a work, it belongs to him. People can disagree on the legal methods used to grant protection to copyrighted works, whether the protection should be of a perpetual kind (Mark Twain wanted it) and how far the copyright owner can extend his control on the end use of his work, particularly that which occurs in the confines of the consumer’s home - dvd or cd ripping and copying, scanning magazines and books and keeping such images on the computer for easy access and so on.

That, however, goes to the heart of the matter. In a naive sense, if someone created a work, it belongs to him. However, intellectual property is fundamentally different from tangible (physical) property. Think about people who view or read the work. It becomes a part of their intellectual repertoire too and surely they have ownership upon anything thats part of their brain. Therefore overly restrictive copyright laws can actually hurt individual liberty and rights by preventing one from expressing one’s thoughts and ideas. Of course you may say that it is only expressions of ideas that are copyrightable and not the ideas themselves; plus there is the fair use exception. In practice however, the situation is more complex than that. Thus, conflicting notions of freedom come into play, and there are no easy answers.

My position, which I hope to expand upon some day, is that there should be some copyright, but it ought to be much less restrictive than what it is today. I have a similar position with respect to patents, and I agree with you that the current IP regime ‘has facilitated a jump from legal protection to legal terrorism.’

Patents are a tricky issue. While I am for regular patents based on the condition of non-obviousness, I am against patents on algorithms and methods (like those used in claims for software patents and patents on business methods), That said, I am a little ambivalent on breakthroughs like the Diffie-Hellman-Merkle Key Exchange and RSA Public Key Cryptography algorithms because of the problems they solved. Did they or did they not deserve patent protection in spite of being mathematical algorithms?

The problem with the present IP regime is that there is too little of innovation and too much of law. Patent trolls are running amok with suspicious patents that the USPTO sometimes seems to grant (the one on turmeric, or the one on play lists for e.g.), and companies are paying up rather than risk a lawsuit with an unknown outcome. This has facilitated a jump from legal protection to legal terrorism.