No more diesel then

[Bernard F]

Originally Posted by Philip Fisher

Get out of town!

Buy a Euro 6 diesel today and only be scrap in 5 years time? Come off it.

Let's just think what the government has actually said.

By 2040 all new cars will have to be a hybrid capable of at least 50 miles. Im pretty sure that is all they said.

So in 22 years time you wont be able to buy a pure diesel or petrol engine. But you will be allowed to buy one in 2039 and just like in the past you will be able to run it out for the duration of it's life.

Euro 6 replaced Euro 5 replaced Euro 4 etc... But Euro 1 cars are not banned from the road. They will just struggle a bit with pollution zones and access to cities.

This whole talk of diesel being dead is nonsense. In the long term Electric will naturally take over but this is entirely dependant on the battery technology. We need I reckon roughly a tripling of range and then the technology will be good enough for most people to buy it and this will drive the change.

Next year I plan on opting out of the company car scheme and replacing my T8 with a D5. I have absolutely no worries about doing so. A new Euro 6 Diesel will have plenty of life.

You should read more. No ICE cars from 2040 so you think they will be on sale in 2039. Diesel depreciation will be massive well before then and will probably soon be dead. Volvo says no diesels in new models and it won’t be long before all others follow. Interesting times.

[Fitzchiv]

Originally Posted by MaDProFF

Some countries are trying to bring the date down to 2030 no ICE

@Ringthane, not sure how you have calculated some of your figures, 8k miles, per year, only 10 mpg difference?

Have you factored Service Costs difference, Road Tax, & Growing difference in fuel costs, though last two will grow wider per year.

Personally you a petrol will cost you less, and that is not taking in depreciation.

If I was you Ringthane, and a personal car buy I would wait till next year they will be far more options for you.

@NU11eaf, I not got my knickers in a twist, I don't wear any, just facts, if it is right or wrong for diesel's makes no difference, they are on there way out like all ICE just petrol has a little longer to live.

I must admit I hadn't considered increased cost of service, road tax (outside of upper band extra) and a growing difference in fuel costs when comparing diesel to petrol when choosing - I'd considered the former two as the same and the latter simply in todays money. So D4 Manual MPG reported as 49, vs 36 for T5. Then £1.19 per L for Petrol, £1.23 per L for Diesel, 0.22 Gallons to a Litre, so over 8000 miles that's £912 for D4 vs £1202 for T5 in annual fuel costs. Feel free to poke holes in my maths!

Interestingly Volvo have upped the GFV since I ordered, but in the exact same spec vehicles with only D4 Manual and T5 Auto as differences their own finance calculator estimates the Diesel loses £175 less over a 4 yr PCP deal vs the Petrol.

So given that, and assuming my maths above holds water, that means the T5 would need to pay off £300 a year extra in fuel + £310 a year in extra tax (I appreciate this isn't an issue for everyone but a T5 would tip my spec over 40k) for it to make sense.

[MaDProFF]

Originally Posted by Fitzchiv

I must admit I hadn't considered increased cost of service, road tax (outside of upper band extra) and a growing difference in fuel costs when comparing diesel to petrol when choosing - I'd considered the former two as the same and the latter simply in todays money. So D4 Manual MPG reported as 49, vs 36 for T5. Then £1.19 per L for Petrol, £1.23 per L for Diesel, 0.22 Gallons to a Litre, so over 8000 miles that's £912 for D4 vs £1202 for T5 in annual fuel costs. Feel free to poke holes in my maths!

Interestingly Volvo have upped the GFV since I ordered, but in the exact same spec vehicles with only D4 Manual and T5 Auto as differences their own finance calculator estimates the Diesel loses £175 less over a 4 yr PCP deal vs the Petrol.

So given that, and assuming my maths above holds water, that means the T5 would need to pay off £300 a year extra in fuel + £310 a year in extra tax (I appreciate this isn't an issue for everyone but a T5 would tip my spec over 40k) for it to make sense.

And Ad Blue, though that not massive.
Dealers/Manufacturers to me seem desperate to keep pushing Diesel's hence offering great deals atm on them, hence people are looking short sighted in my view, as later on it might bite them in the ass.

Service repair costs on a diesel could be massive over petrol a few years down the line like particulate filters etc.

Still a gamble, for me personally I wold certainly not buy a diesel on 8k miles a year, unless it was 0% 3 yr pcp with a good return value, and huge discounts to buy the car on top.

But that said I got nr 12% off an MY19 XC60 T8, £2500 Grant approved, 0% 50% finance and another £1k off for taking the loan, not a pcp deal. got a month to wait but it is company car.

[Quacker]

Originally Posted by Bernard F

You should read more. No ICE cars from 2040 so you think they will be on sale in 2039. Diesel depreciation will be massive well before then and will probably soon be dead. Volvo says no diesels in new models and it won’t be long before all others follow. Interesting times.

It could be that diesel residuals will harden considerably as their proportion of total sales falls to a reasonable 20% compared to recent 50%. They certainly had very very good residuals in the late 1980's and 90's when their market share was down at that level.

I don't get the argument about total running costs. Diesels have never cost me more to service or maintain than reasonably equivalent petrol cars. The very last petrol car I owned was a Jaguar XK8, bought new in 1998 and today my Volvo gives about the same performance using less than half the fuel per mile and is cheaper to service. Even the Land Cruiser that replaced the Jaguar and which I still own, has cost nothing but 10,000 mile oil and filter changes in nearly 20 years and 200,000 hard miles, many towing heavy trailers.

Remember that from some time this year, most petrol cars will be fitted with soot filters, very similar to and for the same reason as for Diesel engines. So the DPF will once again not be a differentiator. Adblue is, and that could be problematic if the designers get it wrong. The cost of fluid is neither here nor there and Adblue is used at less than 5% the rate of diesel use, usually nearer 2.5 to 3% [so three litres for every 100 DERV] and costs around 50p/litre if you know where to look. It should and usually does allow less EGR and more efficient combustion, reducing DERV consumption by more litres than Adblue consumed.

[Ringthane]

The tax is the same for the T5 and the D4. As for the servicing, I’m not aware of the difference in cost for servicing between petrol and diesel, and besides, the variation in servicing costs between London and not-London is more concerning to me. The difference in the fuel cost is pennies. And the 10MPG difference I originally quoted, was from official figures, because I don’t have anything else to go on.

[steadvex]

Why do people think servicing a diesel costs more?

From someone who does invoicing in a garage petrols Imo cost more to service, dpf is pretty much a non issue in a volvo especially if your buying new, glow plugs are very rare to change. You could argue they get thru tyres quicker, but since petrols are all turbo's now even that is a moot point, road tax is the same if your buying new.

Even doing only 8,000 a year i imagine the diesel would cost a lot less to run and service.

From my own experience, like for like cars petrols tend to use around 30% more fuel and that figure only increases as the car gets heavier.

If your buying today I would suggest buying the one you want, if you want diesel buy diesel, if you want petrol buy petrol! Many people who only drive petrol are quick to tell me how bad diesel is and the mpg is all lies, but most who have had both from a running cost pov seem to always prefer diesel that I've talked too.

[OV4]

For several years I was doing 30,000 miles p.a. in my own car (not a company car). I ran a mk4 Golf with a 130bhp turbodiesel engine which offered excellent economy at a very modest purchase price (I bought it when it was over ten years old). Its worst consumption (I kept tank-to-tank records over the course of its life with me) was 49.5 mpg and its best was 61 mpg, with the average being 54.5; and the average cost of fuel per mile worked out at about 9.5 pence. Insurance was about £300 a year (would have been less with a lower annual mileage) and servicing was routine fluids and tyres only, apart from a new set of discs and pads at about 115,000 miles. Basically, it was faultless and did me as well as a much newer vehicle.

I won’t mention the depreciation because it was an old car and not a balanced comparison with the situation for a new car.

If I’d run a comparable Golf with the 1.6 petrol engine over the same conditions I’d reckon on getting 36-42 mpg (as seen by a friend who had one for a while) meaning fuel would have cost me about a third as much again - or, over the 90,000 or so miles I ran it, about an extra three thousand pounds. Insurance and servicing could not have been less, as it was already minimal.

I was on a very tight budget at the time and could not have borne the extra £1,000 a year cost to fuel an equivalent petrol car over my relatively high annual mileage (for a private user, not a company car driver).

It looks as though diesel sales are declining rapidly, but I guess they won’t collapse to nil; rather, they’ll return to a lower base and will be bought by high-mileage drivers, those with bigger / heavier cars, and those who tow (towing is ruinous in a petrol car. My old Accord would return sub-20mpg while towing, compared to its usual 33). Some people will still want them, even in 2039, and if the new tech in development works, pretty much eliminating oxides of nitrogen, they will be very clean indeed.

Volvo cancelling diesels in this new model seems a bit previous; perhaps they think it will only be bought in North America and China, or perhaps they have hybrid models tuned for economy (i.e. not with a 300hp petrol engine) coming down the pipeline. Seems a bit odd to me otherwise.

[Lexman8]

There's no perfect (fossil) fuel but diesel is getting an unfair bashing right now. Yes, there are problems with it but the latest Euro 6 engines are much cleaner than earlier ones.

To balance things up, let me do a bit of petrol bashing:

• it produces much higher levels of CO2
• it has far higher levels of benzene and toluene, both carcinogenic
• petrol contains higher levels of other VOCs damaging to the environment
• recent research suggests that micro-particulate matter from newer petrol engines is more damaging to health than diesel particulate
• petrol engines create more pollution than diesels when their catalyst is cold so short journeys are actually more polluting
• eventually the government will introduce measures to clean up petrol engines and these will increase costs, etc

My mate has an XC90 T6 and doing ~10k miles per annum he'd spend over £600 a year more on fuel than I would. Fuel efficiency is particularly important in the second-hand market so used Euro-6 ones may even become more desirable in future; who knows?

I'm not in the least worried about owning a diesel. Other opinions are available.

[ukden]

Most of the anti diesel sentiment is due to the media banging on about pollution caused by diesel engined cars in towns. They rarely differentiate between older vehicles usually euro4 and before which are the real culprits and the current euro6 vehicles which in reality are no worse than petrol powered cars.

This has resulted in all diesel cars being tarred with the same brush.

I noticed when "What Car" recently did a full test on a new XC40 D4 they found that it was producing less NOX than many petrol engined cars. (The test was done in real world driving conditions).

Strangely this kind of information never seems to make the headlines.

I would love to have an electric powered car in which I can make a 600 mile journey towing a caravan with only one stop for a recharge.

It is not going to happen any time soon, which is one reason why the ICE powered vehicle is going to be with us for a while yet.

[OV4]

And I’d love to know what the figures look like for heavy vehicles.

I was behind a bus a few days ago and it was spewing out clouds of black sooty smoke. Only a 58 plate - I’ve seen (lots of) cleaner-running Routemasters. But ‘it’s a bus, innit’, so it can’t be doing any worse than emitting daisies and sunshine.