What is (are) the problem(s) with diesel engined cars?

A lot of people also like the Diesel / Automatic/Semi Automatic setup as it does make wafty driving and driving in London a lot easier or more agreeable, as well as motorway cruising fairly uninvolved. Which a lot of people like for that reason, it makes it effortless owing to the torque of those engines. Furthermore they generally provide pretty good economy in terms of mpg, but they do cost a fair bit (from my experience) to maintain and fix.

If I were driving 20+k miles a year, I'd consider a diesel - unfortunately larger displacement "fun" engined petrol cars are getting rarer. I'm lucky to get 30mpg :o
 
fonzee said:
That'll be broke then.
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I think he's exaggerating, but most four-cylinder diesel engines do have a very annoying narrow power band. That's why I liked the A4 TDI Multitronic I drove, the gearbox seemed to know what it needed to do at all times.
 
Howard said:
I think he's exaggerating, but most four-cylinder diesel engines do have a very annoying narrow power band. That's why I liked the A4 TDI Multitronic I drove, the gearbox seemed to know what it needed to do at all times.
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The multitronic is a CVT, so it will always try to keep the engine in an optimum operating window to give the most torque/efficiency. But having driven the A4 Multitronic petrol, it's quite terrible!
 
I know it is, I think that's why I liked it. Not driven the petrol though or any other CVTs to compare it to, mind you, and I'm aware of their reliability reputation, so I wouldn't buy one ;)
 
The thing with petrol cars is that their equivilant diesel brothers tend to be/feel quicker in the real world performance. Most petrol engined car simply feel underpowered unless you go to the upper level engine spec's so it's more of a question of how you like to drive as well as how many miles you do.
My previous car a TDI 130 passat was more than capable for overtaking and even had a good top end performance, ok if you actually sat down and looked at the performance figures they would look slow, but because of the torque the car felt fast. The only real petrol alternative would have been the 1.8T as the 2.0N/A feels much slower and returns roughly half the fuel economy, and is more expensive to tax.
Don't get me wrong, I pretty much loath all modern diesels as they are consistantly getting more complicated which of course means many more problems, and I see that on a daily basis.
 
realscot said:
My previous car a TDI 130 passat was more than capable for overtaking and even had a good top end performance, ok if you actually sat down and looked at the performance figures they would look slow, but because of the torque the car felt fast. The only real petrol alternative would have been the 1.8T as the 2.0N/A feels much slower and returns roughly half the fuel economy, and is more expensive to tax.
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That was mainly a consequence of VW having a relatively poor selection of mid-size petrol engines at the time rather than some inherent problem with petrol engines in general. The normally aspirated 2.0 130PS petrol engine in the B5.5 Passat was a good match for the diesel in performance terms.

Even the relatively crappy 2.0 8v isn't massively slower than the diesel in practice, as long as it's driven like a petrol rather than a diesel.
 
Thanks very much for some interesting replies. I doubt that I would be doing more than 10k miles per year, 50% around town and 50% on motorways so I guess that petrol is the way to go.

One further problem I have heard about diesels is that the fuel can freeze in very cold climates - I know of two people to whom this has happened, one in the Alps (when he was due to return home) and the other in Scotland.

Thanks again.
 
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