Take a look around the parking lots at NSU. A wide variety of vehicles are parked on this fine campus, many as unique as the very people who drive them. You’ll spot clean Lexus sedans, sophisticated Japanese coupes and even a Maserati if you look hard enough. But one group of cars really stands out for a different attributes other than style or speed — the diesels.
Hybrids are all the rage today. With more than 2.8 million hybrids on the road, you, or someone you know, likely drive one. They are really popular for a variety of reasons but, for the most part, for their ability to get over 25 mpg, even when they are speeding down the HOV at 90 mph. So, it would seem that there really isn’t much of a market left for diesel power anymore, but I am here to tell you that you’re wrong.
You can’t really blame the hybrid fad. Before they existed it, there were just diesels and small engines that could produce the similar miles per gallon of a hybrid. But diesels of yesterday were considered noisy, dirty and inconvenient so, like an endangered animal, they started to disappear.
Some of that same stigma is still prevalent in American consumers’ minds, and many pass up diesels for the same obsolete assumption of the past.
Remove those notions from your mind immediately. Good. Now that we have a blank slate, go test drive a diesel. Actually, let me save you the trip. Diesels are not like they used to be. It may take a little getting used to but things have changed.
Unlike their predecessors, diesel engines today are mostly turbocharged and use advanced technologies and emission controls that, in some cases, make them more eco-friendly than hybrids, meaning that they are far less dirty than they used to be. Yet some states actually prohibit the sale of diesels today. This type of archaic thinking needs to be replaced by the forward ideals our generation is becoming used to.
It is great to see that those ideals have made it to NSU. I applaud the diesel drivers and their thrifty, flashy cars. I think now that Americans are starting to recognize alternatives to gasoline. Some are starting to forget that there are other options to hybrids.
