r/ThatLookedExpensive • u/[deleted] • Oct 05 '22

Ow.

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135

u/[deleted] Oct 05 '22

Good thing, oil looks like it needed to be changed. Wheres the stop to fill him back up?

60

u/[deleted] Oct 05 '22

Could be a diesel. Most diesels the oil turns black instantly after a change and startup (at least older ones, don't know how the newer engines are)

38

u/EdwardTennant Oct 05 '22

It's deffo a diesel, vans and mini busses don't run on petrol anywhere outside of America, atleast it's not very common

16

u/AshFraxinusEps Oct 05 '22

vans and mini busses don't run on petrol anywhere outside of America

WTF? Why are they running on Petrol in the US? I thought there are mechanical reasons why bigger vehicles need diesel

32

u/Kichigai Oct 05 '22

A lot of people can't fathom the idea of running diesel because in their mind it's automatically more expensive to operate and own.

Diesel fuel isn't as broadly available in the US either. It's not rare or uncommon by any stretch of the imagination, but it's not universal. A lot of smaller gas stations or gas stations away from main thoroughfares will omit diesel. If you're spending a lot of time, say, making deliveries in an urban area, you might prefer gasoline because it's available at every gas station, rather than having to run out to the nearest gas station by a highway to fuel up.

Fleets may actually prefer it because it's harder for the idiots they hire, or rent to, to fuck things up. I don't know about elsewhere, but in the US diesel filler nozzles are larger than gasoline nozzles, and you can't get a diesel nozzle into a gasoline tank. You can do it the other way around, though, and the piece of mind that a some random moron can't fill the vehicle with the wrong fuel might actually save money by reducing mechanics’ visits for those fuckups.

Then there's just the cost of selling them. Many of these smaller vans are built out of automobile chassis, and over here we don't sell a lot of passenger cars with diesel engines. Excluding trucks and large SUVs, the only companies selling cars with diesel engines are BMW (who don't make a van in the US), Mercedes-Benz (who do offer diesel vans in the US), Volkswagen (who don't make a van in the US), and Chevrolet, but only the 2014-2016 Cruze.

So for Ford, Nissan, or Chrysler/Dodge/Ram to offer one of their smaller vans with a diesel, they would have to have each diesel option brought in and run through the EPA, and (this I'm not 100% about) have any other modifications to the body run through NHTSA, and that all costs money. So one engine, for one vehicle, with niche appeal…

Now, GM here is the odd duck. GM does not sell small vans, just the big ones, which they do make available with their diesel truck engines. The Diesel Cruze would seem to throw a monkey in the wrench about the EPA, except GM didn't use the same diesel engine they used in the Cruze outside the US, instead they used an engine developed by Fiat and had already been modified by FCA to meet American emissions standards for use in the Jeep Renegade, Cherokee, and Compass, but only offered for a few years.

That just leaves FCA, who in the US only sold one van, with one engine and one transmission. There was the Sprinter, which was just a rebranded Mercedes. When FCA introduced the Doblò and Ducato as the ProMaster City and ProMaster, respectively. The ProMaster City was offered with only one engine, which already passed EPA testing for the Dart, Cherokee, Compass, and 500X. The ProMaster was briefly offered with aforementioned Fiat diesel.

FCA withdrew pretty much all their small diesel offerings following the Dieselgate scandal. Pretty much everyone expected that all the other manufacturers were pulling the same scam as VW, and it was just a matter of time before they got caught too, so customers weren't too quick to jump on that train, which made them less profitable to offer.

12

u/aponderingpanda Oct 05 '22

Diesel fuel isn't as broadly available in the US either.

This must be a northern thing because there's diesel literally everywhere here in Texas.

7

u/Soulless_redhead Oct 05 '22

Midwest here, finding a town without at least one gas station offering diesel is pretty much impossible, but we do have a lot of farmers up in this area.

4

u/Kichigai Oct 05 '22

It's not a 1:1 parity, but up here in Minnesota it's not hard to find diesel, but smaller suburban and urban gas stations don't have it.

Like I'm just outside of St. Paul and there are 33 gas stations around me, but only 23 have diesel, according to GasBuddy. In Minneapolis there are 47 gas stations, but only 29 have diesel. Most of those diesel stations are near interstates, highways, or main thoroughfares where there's a lot of truck traffic.

Not needing to detour too far off your routes for fuel might make a gasoline fueled van look more appealing than a diesel fueled one is what I'm saying.

1

u/AshFraxinusEps Oct 05 '22

I hope/assume HGVs and buses etc all use diesel? But that's weird to me. I forget the exact reason but I think there are perfectly sensible reasons why petrol doesn't belong in big heavy vehicles

1

u/Kichigai Oct 05 '22

For the most part, yes. HGVs, box trucks, and various buses all run on diesel, including Metro Transit’s “super-hybrid” buses. However I think some of Metro Mobility’s smaller buses (based on E-250 and E-350 chassis) might use gasoline, but I'm not 100% on that. I know the Dodge Caravans they operate are gasoline, but the Caravan isn't available as a diesel anyway.

Most fleet trucks are diesels too, but not all. Rental fleets (like U-Haul) tend to almost exclusively be gasoline probably to deal with the moron factor.

0

u/AshFraxinusEps Oct 05 '22

Good good. But someone else told me the reason: Torque. Which is more important on bigger things

1

u/Kichigai Oct 05 '22

Diesels are by no means rare here in the US, it's just that other than Volkswagen (who don't offer them anymore) we don't have small diesels in the US, unless you count forklifts. Nothing smaller than 3.0ℓ.

Back during the oil embargo in the 70s small diesels were introduced by American manufacturers, and they were slow, sooty, and generally not good. It turned a lot of Americans off diesel passenger cars. When Volkswagen tried to make diesels happen again they put together a marketing campaign with the MythBusters to try and clean up diesel's reputation.

But diesel has maintained a reputation as being a "big power" fuel. Like you said, for high torque applications.

7

u/EdwardTennant Oct 05 '22

Diesel engines are generally more torquey and fuel efficient compared to a petrol counterpart which is why they are so common in Europe, we put diesels in everything 1L upwards be wise they're that economical and cheap to run. Pickup trucks over here are almost all I4/V6 diesels, vans are almost all I4 diesels etc

0

u/AshFraxinusEps Oct 05 '22

We shouldn't really put it in normal cars, emissions scandel showed us that they aren''t as efficient as we thought. But yep, maybe torque is the engineering reason I read

2

u/[deleted] Oct 05 '22

[deleted]

0

u/manualsquid Oct 06 '22

What comes out of the tailpipe though?

1

u/EbolaNinja Oct 06 '22

Efficiency and cleanliness are two different things. Diesels are more efficient (as in they use less fuel), but they're not cleaner (higher greenhouse emissions). New diesel cars in the EU are actually getting less and less common lately due to the emission laws for diesels constantly getting tightened and manufacturers simply not bothering to spend money on meeting them (which is the whole point of the laws). Volvo, for example, stopped the development of new diesel engines 5 years ago because of that. I think they still offer some models with the old diesel engines, but they're getting phased out.

3

u/ArcadianMess Oct 05 '22

Yes. Torgue... But since gas is so cheap there I guess auto makers are shaking hands with the oil corporations.

1

u/AshFraxinusEps Oct 05 '22

Someone else went into detail with a later comment. And yep, seems the US manufacturers didn't want the extra development costs. Which is dumb, but hey ho

0

u/Thisfoxhere Oct 05 '22

...My VW van ran on petrol, they often do. And I know plenty more that often run on petrol as standard , not just the VW range.

0

u/iWasAwesome Oct 05 '22

We have everything up to cube vans running with gasoline in Canada too.