In Europe, close to 50% of the cars and trucks on the road are diesels. So why not in the US? Polls reveal that Americans aren’t as comfortable with diesel-engined passenger cars and some say it has to do with an poorly-designed Oldsmobile diesel engine from almost 40 years ago. Specifically, back in 1978 Oldsmobile designed a V8 diesel and it was a real disaster. Here’s the story:

In order to meet new American emissions regulations in the mid-1970s, executives at General Motor’s Oldsmobile Division decided to design and install a series of diesel engines in their passenger cars. This was because diesels were not subject to the same emissions requirements as gasoline engines and this helped them meet the federal requirements of the time.

Working at a frantic pace, the first GM diesels hit the dealer’s lots in 1978 and immediately there were problems. To begin with, Oldsmobile powertrain engineers based the new diesel’s design on the GM’s famous 350 V8. Ask any car buff and they will tell you that the problem was that GM engineers “simply slapped new diesel heads on the standard 350 block” and did little else. This is an automotive urban legend, though. The service techs at www.antiochchryslerdodgejeep.net know the story well and tell us that the new block was absolutely properly reinforced and was built of a sturdier cast-iron alloy. The trouble came from the cylinder heads
Diesel engines have much higher compression ratios than gasoline engines do. As a result, diesel engines require stronger head bolts, and more of them, to compensate for the diesel’s higher cylinder pressure. The Oldsmobile diesel, however, maintained the same 10-bolt pattern and head bolts as gasoline engines, so that common production tooling could be used for both the gasoline and diesel engines. This would prove to be a fatal decision for the production engineers.

Production of the Oldsmobile diesel lasted from 1978 and 1985. Many engines failed due to head problems and this caused a class-action lawsuit that saw owners reimbursed the cost of replacement engines. The Oldsmobile diesel debacle was so bad that it spurred legislators in several states to draft early lemon laws.

Only now are diesels beginning to reenter the U.S. car market—and most of those are from European manufacturers who have been manufacturing diesel engines for over a century and doing so quite successfully. Today many fine diesel automobiles are available from companies such as Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep and Ram.

Source: Antioch Chrysler