The Hindu : Business : The big, noisy and underpowered

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Aug 09, 2004

Business

Business

The big, noisy and underpowered

WELL, AS the caption suggests, that is how the diesel engine performed and looked just two decades back and in India it was a couple of degrees worse! Today the entire scenario has taken a 180-degree turn. Mercedes Benz has always pioneered the research for automobile advancement ever since the early 1920s. In the mid-1920s it introduced the supercharger (Kompressor) that later became the final word for super tuning of engines and is today used abundantly for enhancing engine power. A host of other such inventions came to life in its research and development department of which one was the Common rail Direct Injection (CDI) diesel technology. The CDI badge on the car's trunk lid finally became a patent for identifying Mercedes Benz cars driven with such diesel engines.

A diesel engine as you might know has a totally different technology that does not use an electrical spark to ignite the fuel under compression in the engine; instead a controlled quantity of diesel is injected through a very high compression mechanical pump coupled to the engine that turns along with the engine constantly. The diesel engine noise that one hears is the detonation of the fuel injected in the engine cylinder

Engine control module

Now all this basic technology remains the same but some new innovations have been added to this system. The new system is quite like the electronic controller of a modern petrol car, the engine control module (ECM). This controller or module is actually the brain of a modern petrol engine that controls the fuel — air supply and also adjusts the spark timing to ignite the fuel at the most appropriate time so that the fuel burns fully without leaving any unburnt gases in the exhaust. In this system the petrol engine does not have the conventional mechanical carburettor, instead the fuel is supplied under high pressure through a fuel pump — in modern cars, submersed inside the fuel in the tank.

This very system has now been incorporated in the modern diesel engine thereby eliminating the conventional mechanical fuel injection pump. So no more periodical calibration is required, no ugly plumbing and piping around the engine; in fact sometimes it makes things so difficult for people to tell a diesel engine from a petrol engine by mere looks that one has to start the engine to hear the diesel knock. Earlier, diesel engines were used extensively in commercial vehicles for many reasons — they were noisy and harsh, had very poor take off power and hence poor pick up, had crude technology and used to spew oil and smoke and last but not the least consumed larger quantities of fuel and engine oil. The modern diesel engine has taken a full circle and now competes with its petrol counterpart, the internal combustion engine, which is supposed to have superior technology.

The turbo charged diesel engine was first used in the flagship model of the Mercedes Benz — the `S' class — in the early 1980s and that too in the upper niche market of the U.S. It became quite a hit there. It went into a refinement mode and was then taken up by other premium car manufacturers worldwide.

Today it has become so popular and highly advanced in technology that Europeans accept it with open arms. Almost 50 per cent of modern cars in Europe these days leave the factory with a diesel engine inside the bonnet; in fact, some premium models of Mercedes `S' class, the 3 Series, 5 and 7 Series of the BMW and a host of other manufacturers such as Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Rover, Peugeot and Hyundai are using this engine in their upper and premium models. Honda, which had earlier shunned the diesel technology, has now taken to it seriously and is producing some of the best and most reliable engines in the world (Bar-Honda in the `F1' racing circuit). Globally engine designations and fancy acronyms can now be identified with each car manufacturer, like CDI (Mercedes), CRDi (Hyundai), CRTDi (Hyundai), Hdi (Peugeot), TDCI (Ford), JTD (Fiat & Alfa Romeo) & CTDI (Honda) and each of these is associated with the modern common rail direct injection technology.

Today the diesel engine is used not only for its extra torque in engine performance but also for its low maintenance, extra fuel economy and performance as good as its petrol rival, in powerful `take off' performance! Most of the times the driver cannot even make out if he is actually driving a petrol or a diesel engine in the car.

In Europe, petrol and diesel prices are almost the same, around one euro a litre. The Europeans use the modern diesel technology extensively that at times gives 15 to 25 per cent better mileage than its petrol counterpart and virtually the same engine performance.

In fact going by the recently made public research results of Mercedes running on bio-diesel, the day may not be too far away when diesel engines will rule the roost, chewing the cud (since bio-diesel is produced from a plant) and displacing the common petrol engine completely. Till then happy motoring.

Tutu Dhawan

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