You may have noticed that new cars with gas engines “diesel.”
They clatter and rattle a little at idle. It’s especially noticeable if you raise the hood (and remove the big plastic sound-deadening cover almost all new car engines are covered with).
What you’re listening to is the sound of direct injection – which is not-so-quietly replacing port fuel injection (which replaced throttle body, or TBI, injection).
DI is replacing – supplanting – PFI because DI achieves a fractional fuel-efficiency increase compared with PFI. It’s not anything you’d notice. Maybe 1-2 MPG overall. But the gunvernment notices – and that (gunvernment pressure) rather than market demand – is what increasingly drives new vehicle design. A year from now, in 2016, the gunvernment’s fuel efficiency fatwa that decrees all new cars – and all new trucks – will achieve an average of at least 35.5 MPG goes into effect.
Italics added.
A small handful of cars achieve 35 MPG or better … on the highway.
Almost no new cars average 35.5 MPG.
Hybrids like the Prius are among the few that do.
Those that don’t will incur government-enforced “gas guzzler” penalties – passed on to you, the car buyer. Your next new car may be slightly more fuel-efficient. But it will also cost you significantly more.
And in more than one way, too.
The federal fuel economy fatwa – Corporate Average Fuel Economy, in government-speak – is also choke-holding the auto industry to get rid of V-8s and even V-6 engines. Including those that used to be standard in luxury cars. For example, Mercedes will no longer offer a V-8 in the 2015 E-Class; the BMW 3 and 5 Series now come standard with 2.0 liter four-cylinder engines. Only the very affluent – and gunvernment capos such as Obama and his successors – will enjoy big V-8s henceforth.
But back to the DI thing – and how it’s going to ding you.
There’s the additional up-front cost, of course. DI requires (among other things) a specialized fuel-delivery system with multiple fuel pumps instead of just one – including a high-pressure pump near the injectors.Extremely high pressure. In excess of 30,000PSI (not a typo). The extreme pressure is the source of DI’s fuel-efficiency advantage. The fuel is almost ideally atomized, so almost perfectly burned – which means the engine uses a bit less of it to make the same power as it would have if fed the fuel by less efficient means, such as port fuel injection.
