In an increasingly competitive auto market, automobile manufacturers are always on their toes to look for that opening which would take them to the top of the mountain. Asian automakers like Toyota, Honda and Nissan read the future clearly and have come up with products which they see will be popular in the future.
Decades ago, Japanese automakers foresaw that the price of petroleum fuel will increase sharply. Their response to this is the development of fuel efficient vehicles. And to make sure that they will have a loyal buyer base in the future, they added reliability to their vehicles.
The result is what we see today. Japanese automakers continue to rack up sales and increase market share in the United States while the Big Three closed down plants, reduced the number of their employees, and are now in the middle of their turnaround plan.
Today, what all automakers have in common is finding a way to produce fuel efficient vehicles. The demand for these autos has been soaring as the price of petroleum products continue to increase especially during the summer months. The most popular fuel efficient vehicle today is the Toyota Prius and it is a gas-electric hybrid car.
A hybrid means that the car has a small internal combustion engine and an electric motor with an efficient battery pack. The electric motor provides additional power to the engine when needed. During city driving where frequent acceleration and deceleration is needed, the fuel-saving capability of a hybrid is very much evident. Hybrids like the Prius are equipped with a powertrain which shuts down the engine during deceleration. This reduces fuel consumption.
As hybrid sales continue to increase, a new trend is on the rise which is the use of diesel engines. In Europe, automakers are developing clean diesel engines for years now. Audi, the German automaker has even entered a diesel race car in the prestigious 24 Hours of Le Mans which won two years in a row. In the United States, the return to popularity of diesel engines is only starting to show.
In the past, diesel engines have been frowned at because of the black soot that they produce. Noisy operation of this type of internal combustion engine is also one of the reasons why it never made a positive impact in the United States in the past decades.
New generations of diesel engines though are being developed. Among the advantages of diesel engines is that diesel fuel is usually priced lower than gasoline. Another is that it produces more torque than a similarly sized gasoline engine. Torque and not hp is important for faster acceleration from a standstill. This is why performance enthusiasts are favoring the return of diesel engines in the country.
Among the automakers which have expressed their plan to include diesel models in their lineup are Ford and General Motors. In fact, the Dearborn-based automaker FoMoCo has already released the F-Super Duty Series with diesel engines. General Motors, on the other hand, recently started negotiation to buy a majority share in an Italian diesel engine manufacturer.
This move by General Motors is seen as part of its turnaround plan which also involved revitalizing its Saturn division. The said division's lineup has been revitalized by General Motors by partnering it with German automaker Opel. The result is a brand new lineup with a better styling and performance as well as refined auto parts like and other components.
Although hybrids and diesels are different technologies, it is possible that a diesel engine be used in a hybrid resulting to a hybrid of the two technologies.
