SOMETIME during the night of Sept. 29, 1913, aboard the steamer Dresden, Rudolph Diesel, age 55, slipped out of his overcoat and into the English Channel. His body was found 10 days later.
The inventor of the engine that bears his name had a Homburg hat full of troubles. He was broke. He suffered crippling headaches -- the common cold of fin de siecle Europe.
And he was disillusioned. Diesel, a pacifist and utopian idealist, had hoped his engine, powered by renewable vegetable oils -- biodiesel, we call it today -- would give the common farmer and tradesman a source of great power to compete against the steam-driven leviathans whose smokestacks blackened the skies of Europe's great cities.
Needless to say, that whole worker's paradise thing never really panned out.
Like not a few founding fathers of the Industrial Revolution, Diesel had faith in technology as an agent of social justice. In this respect he was like Narcis Monturiol, the Spanish inventor of the world's first mechanically powered submarine (1864), who imagined the vessel not as a weapon of war but as the common man's conduit to an underwater utopia, a bathyspheric Shangri-La. (Jules Verne's character Captain Nemo seems to have been patterned on Monturiol.)
As for Diesel, I wonder: If he were alive today, would he kill himself all over again?
Diesel engine technology is one of the most promising, and least appreciated, transportation solutions available. Though sales of diesels have nearly doubled in the last six years, according to J.D. Power & Associates, they still account for a mere 4% share of the U.S. light-vehicle market, compared with about 40% of the European market. Because of a rising tide of emission requirements, diesel-powered light vehicles have an uncertain future in the United States.
Diesel engines are 20% to 40% more fuel efficient than gas engines. For example: The gas-powered 2.0-liter VW Golf GL is rated at 24 miles per gallon city, 31 mpg highway, according to the EPA, whereas its diesel twin is rated at 38/46 mpg -- half again higher. That's roughly the efficiency advantage of a hybrid-electric powertrain such as the one in the new Ford Escape Hybrid. Diesel fuel is also cheaper than regular gas, averaging around 20 cents less per gallon nationwide.
Several high-tech oil-burners arrive in the U.S. this year, including the 2005 Mercedes-Benz E320 CDI, and our test vehicle, the 2004 VW Touareg V10 TDI, the fifth diesel-powered VW for sale in the U.S.
