MotorTrend Tests the 1500's

FishOnOne wrote:

J2S,
How about you compare apples to apples with 2015 .5 ton trucks only and be more specific.

BTW... I don't know what part of the country you live, but here in Texas diesel fuel has been a solid $0.60 more than gas as long as I can remember. Link

That's why I merely state that the brush may be a little wide. I'm in the PNW - Pacific North West. Land of mountains, lumberjacks, trees and hipsters (although I hear that they've been migrating to Austin as of late). The west coast has traditionally not had as large of a differential between diesel and unleaded as the eastern-half of the US. That's why I don't believe diesel is a panacea, but one must measure the merits of power plant and its running costs against the alternatives. Ecodiesels, VW/Audi/Porsche TDI's, BMW Diesels, Mercedes Diesels all sell at rapid-pace here on the west coast. You see tons of them all over the place. Again, diesels tend to make sense on the west coast. They offer a bonafide savings most of the time. However, if I was in your shoes seeing a big differential like that for fuel, I doubt I'd own my current truck and would probably wait a little longer hoping for some sort of super-charged/turbo-charged gasser HD pickup truck.

I was comparing my much heavier and what should be less-efficient truck against my old half-ton as running costs mattered to me as well. In this lop-sided comparison, I'm actually saving in my specific case (again, this is not the rule, just a case). As for half-ton comparisons, I think everybody is in a wait and see holding-pattern. Ford and RAM have taken 2 very different approaches to better fuel economy. One went diesel, the other went light-weighting. These are interesting times especially for any engineering nut.

Nobody in 2000 could predict the energy run-up in costs. Hell, just 5 years ago, everybody was saying Natural Gas would own the heavy-duty transportation market. That hasn't really materialized and with the shrinking delta between diesel and natural gas, it makes it a tougher proposition for nation-wide fleets to switch fuels.

However, what I can offer-up is to watch Mazda's HCCI technology (Homogeneous Charge Compression Ignition). This concept gets a gas engine to about as close to diesel as it possibly can. It uses compression to ignite the fuel air mixture exactly as a diesel does. It has an open throttle as far as I understand it. This means a gasoline engine runs almost exactly like a diesel with nearly the same efficiencies and pumping losses (HCCI engines still use a lower compression ratio than a diesel, at least when I last read on this tech). This tech could be the real game changer that removes the advantage of diesels in light-duty vehicles. This tech has been floating around since the early 2000's, however it is only until recently that we have the processing power for the right price to handle all the calculations that are needed to figure out how much fuel to inject and when for a gasoline motor.