Diesel Or Hybrid – Which Fuel-Efficient Car Choice Is The Correct One For You?

Everything is getting greener – or certainly that is the impression you get as the car manufacturers seem to be releasing new, greener cars on an almost weekly basis.

But however much you want to save the earth, the principal deciding factor when you buy your next new car will normally be financial. The more gas you can conserve, the more money you keep in your pocket. So how do hybrids and diesel cars, the great rivals in the race to better gasoline efficiency compare? And how do you choose which is right for you?

Let’s take a look at the older of these two technologies first: Diesel gets its name from Rudolf Diesel, who worked out the basic processes used in the motors that bear his name way back in 1897.

Although diesel engines have been around quite a long time, it is not unreasonable to point out that over many decades, they did not really evolve a lot. In fact, until the last 15 years or so, diesel engines were characterized by noise and black exhaust smoke, and it was starting to seem like they should be gotten rid of.

The black smoke that older diesel engines are often produce is actually made up of very small particles of soot, referred to as particulate matter (PM), which can cause respiratory conditions. This resulted in some states, such as Japan, imposing ever stricter rules which all but removed diesel cars from the roads completely.

Unexpectedly, recently, diesel has bounced back. Now championed by such companies as Audi and Mercedes Benz, diesel engines have become increasingly refined, and the “common rail” fuel injection system first commercialized by Denso in 1995 has also yielded lower emissions. It isn’t just trucks and tractors which use diesel engines now – you can find these engines in many high-end vehicles such as Mercedes, Jaguar and BMW also.

Well, you may well be be surprised to find out that hybrid drivetrains also have a long history. The founder of Porsche, legendary engineer Ferdinand Porsche, created a hybrid car called Semper Vivus all the way back in 1900. However, unlike diesel, hybrid powertrains did not take off back then. Maybe it was the complexity and cost of this particular methodology? Anyway, for years the hybrid vehicle looked like an evolutionary dead end – an interesting anomaly in the history of the development of the car.

And then came the Prius. First launched in Japan in December 1997, this first full-on commercialization of the hybrid system in a passenger car could also have withered and died on the branch. Just after it was launched, when I first rode in this first-generation Prius, it seemed like a technical tour de force, but there was always a question as to who would be buying one.

A lesser company would have let it expire, but not Toyota. They say that Japanese companies have tend to look further into the future than western corporations, and this is also true of Toyota. The first Prius was just a small part of a long-term plan – not only to produce a specialist hybrid model, but also for the hybrid powertrain to be offered across the model range.

Now, 14 years later, and Toyota’s foresight and focus on the hybrid theme is reaping them some incredible rewards. One major advantage for them is that “hybrid” as a concept is very strongly connected to the Toyota corporate identity in general, and with the Prius in particular. We should not really be surprised that over 3 million Prius cars have been sold globally, with 1 million of them being in the US alone.

What is interesting to me is how separate paths of the development of these 2 different approaches to powering cars in actual fact has a really important bearing on deciding which is going to be best for you when you buy a new car.

As you can see, the diesel solution was created in Germany and it is the German car companies who have pushed development the most. On the other hand, the hybrid did not get very far in Germany, but now has been taken on by a Japanese manufacturer.

Why is this of any sort of interest to a new car buyer? Well, you need to do no more than to consider the road conditions in these two nations to realize just why their respective engineers have focused on these different options: Germany is well known for the autobahn – wide, fast highways with parts that have no upper speed limit. Japan, in contrast, has streets clogged with traffic and with innumerable traffic lights.

This background actually will give you a really big hint as to which is most likely to suit your way of driving and situation: If you are more likely to do longer, cruising trips, then the diesel engine option will be best for you. (After all, a hybrid cruising fast is nothing more than a normal petrol-engined car carting around a load of additional battery weight.) On the other hand, if you do a lot of your driving in urban areas, then you should choose the hybrid drivetrain that laps up stop-start driving.

In the future, this choice between diesel and hybrid cars is likely to end: Volkswagen is the trailblazer here with its XL1 2-seater city car going on sale in 2 years’ time. This car combines an 0.8 liter diesel engine with a hybrid system to produce a car with a simply unbelievable fuel economy of 313 miles per gallon.

But before that day arrives, the economy-minded car purchaser has to make a choice – diesel or hybrid: And which one you go with is best answered by looking at the type of driving you do.

Stephen Munday co-owns Integrity Exports, a Japanese car exporter which gets used cars from Japanese car auctions for importers around the world. He has twelve years of experience of living and working in Japan, in addition to a high level of fluency in the Japanese language.

This article is (c) Stephen Munday 2011. Permission is only given to reproduce this article in full with the URLs correctly hyperlinked and with the authorship and copyright correctly attributed.

Processing your request, Please wait....