(Photo: Paul Needham / Flickr)You know when you enter an ice-cream shop you are probably going to falter when you get to the front of the line and see the stuff up close. Pistachio or vanilla? Mango-strawberry or cookies ’n cream? Oh, and I was so sure when I walked in here. And don’t get started at the Mr. Indecisive at McDonalds.
So, off to the dealership, determined to buy a (a) gasoline or (b) diesel vehicle.
I blogged not so long ago about why Americans don’t buy many diesel vehicles. The base argument came from the British motoring writer. And of course, European diesels are not the same as ours. But the quality and aesthetic gaps seem to be closing. Check out this report from the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute that compares ownership costs between gas and diesel vehicles. It concludes, in part:
“Overall, the results of our analyses show that diesel vehicles provide owners with a [Total Cost of Ownership] that is less than that of the gas versions of the same vehicles. The estimates of savings for three and five years of ownership vary from a low of $67 in three years to a high of $15,619 in five years, but most of the savings are in the $2,000 to $6,000 range, which also include the extra cost that is usually added to the diesel version of a vehicle.”
So the wind is beginning to blow from a slightly different direction. But it’s still guesswork just how much more the wind will change, or if it will just go back to where it was.
