It must be clear to just about everyone that diesel vehicles cannot be made compliant with new emissions regulations. Agricultural and heavy industry off-road use still has a need for it simply because of the size of the required equipment and the limited number of hours such equipment runs each year. The Fiat Chrysler announcement makes it pretty obvious cheating was most likely industry wide. The heavy truck industry has been skirting emissions by installing pre-2010 engines in trucks for years.
In short, the industry has had close to a decade to come up with something which will both meet the emissions requirements and be sustainable/maintainable and it hasn’t done it. DEF is a band-aid. The Federal Highway Administration has put out some guides to reducing emissions but it is more of a white paper than anything with teeth.
We need to pick a date, say January 1, 2020, for manufacturers and repair shops to cease manufacture and/or installation of diesel engines in any highway vehicle. This gives the industry 3 years to come up with other drive trains that don’t require diesel. For auto manufacturers this shouldn’t be a big issue since diesel was a small percentage of sales. It will be painful for the truck and bus industry, but it has become obvious the pain needs to be felt.
It is not like there aren’t already things out there. They just need to be assembled and tested. Porsche has a 600hp electric with a 300 mile range. Tesla has a 700hp electric which only has a range of 275 miles. Tractor trailers need to run thousands of miles each week which is why they need to be a hybrid solution. Not like most current automotive hybrids which do not fully decouple the gas engine from the transmission. For these trucks they need to be a stand alone generator which charges the batteries and provides electricity for other things such as heat, lights and air conditioning.
Nikola is already taking this approach. While the 1200 mile range between fillups is laudable, I’m not so certain CNG (Compressed Natural Gas) is the correct technology for now. Later, yes, not now though. Will take much time to build out stations. I understand that they own a bunch of CNG, but, for the next decade the smarter move would be to create a version of this truck which uses a generator capable of burning E-85 so most truck stops would just have to do a bit of plumbing and wiring to put a gas and an E-85 pump island on the truck side. The big chains already have them on the car side. Kholer, Honda and a rash of others already make gasoline generators of sufficient size. Many propane models exist as well. Perhaps truck stops could also have tank exchanges like gas stations do for consumer grills?
The point is, we already have the tech but we have a massive resistance to deploy the tech. It is time to force it.
- January 1, 2020 Make it illegal to install a diesel engine in a highway vehicle. Also offer low interest government loans and tax credits for the destruction of a diesel trade in.
- January 1, 2027 Make it illegal to distribute and/or sell highway diesel.
- January 1, 2028 End of low interest loans and tax credits for diesel trade ins.
That allows a 7 year run for those manufacturers who choose to stock pile pre-ban trucks. Probably a bit longer for those running local routes and stock piling massive quantities of diesel but that won’t be a large number. It’s not cheap to put the infrastructure in to stock pile more than a few thousand gallon of fuel. Once you exceed some magic threshold you have to be inspected and possibly certified/licensed by the EPA. I don’t remember what the single site quantity is but I have heard of some farming operations running afoul of it.
