Comparing diesel to petrol is apples to pears, and you know that. Of course the petrol car did worse than the diesel, petrol cars always do. Diesel cars these days get astonishing consumption figures, even better than they used to. Our next car is likely to be a Madza 6 Diesel estate, which has a 2.0 litre turbo-diesel and combined figures of 38mpg (so will do better than that at cruising speed on the open road), yet is bigger and heavier than your 1979 VW, and has all the pollution control and mod-cons you'd expect in a modern car, while having performance figures like a petrol car.
For the same fuel type, cars are doing far more with the same amount of fuel. When taken to extremes, like some of the little Japanese runabouts with 3-cylinder 850cc turbo petrol engines, or the Smart, they can get 80mpg on the open road at 60mph. Charlie i vaguely remember diesel in the 60s was selling for 20+cents to the gallon at terrible herbst, which if i recall correctly, was about 1/3 less than gasoline. i also seem to recall that the old geo metro used to get close to 50 mpg... a friend of mine has one he is comverting to biofuel. jlm __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
