Warning detailed car geek rant to follow:
Friday night I sat next to Seattle Biodiesel founder and president John Plaza at a table at the
Northwest Energy Coalition annual banquet in Seattle. We spent a good portion of the dinner talking about the modifications we had done to our cars.
John has a Mercedes-Benz CDI that he has chipped and done other performance mods to as well as a Chevy pickup with a Duramax diesel. Wandering to the technical side, John said the Chevy was putting about 650 ft-lb of torque to the rear wheels. To put that in perspective, in a gasoline fueled motor, you’d need a more than 600 horsepower motor to make those kinds of numbers! I said, “Holy crap, you could pull a house off its foundations!” He just grinned and said, “Pretty much.”
I use this anecdote to illustrate a difference in the architecture between diesel and gasoline engines. Gasoline engines are about horsepower, diesels are about torque. Torque does the work, horsepower is simply a measure of the power available to create torque. Peak power and peak torque occur at different RPMs--where torque is created by horsepower.
The diesel engine, for which
Rudolph Diesel was granted a patent in 1898, was designed as an agricultural engine to run on peanut oil. The diesel engine with lower operating temperatures and fewer moving parts embodies a philosophy of doing more with less. Commercial diesel engines routinely surpass 1,000,000 miles on the odometer. It isn’t unheard of for diesel passenger cars to reach 300,000-500,000 miles.
Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen have been manufacturing diesel engines for as long as they have been making cars. The current Volkswagen TDI power plant in its most popular 1.9 liter configuration responds extremely well to aftermarket tuning and has become the diesel hobbyist platform of choice.
When I purchased my Jetta TDI, I chose to follow the modifications detailed on the website www.stealthtdi.com, in which the author specifies the engine modifications he has done to his Jetta in order to enter into amateur racing events. I simply chose to run mine on biodiesel.
By utilizing two relatively cheap engine modifications, I saw remarkable increases in performance. I highly recommend reprogramming of the engine control unit (ECU) in any TDI engine. I had mine done by Jeff Robertson at Rocket Chip for $285, whose site is now offline. Rich and Marcel at Fix-Um-Haus swear by the Alligator chips in their Volkswagens.
Diesel engines have dramatically larger torque to horsepower ratios and produce the power at much lower rpms than gasoline engines. My Jetta’s torque power curve climbs steadily to about 2,500 rpm where it flattens out and drops considerably at 3,500 rpm. Given that the car redlines approaching 4,500 rpm, there’s no reason to ever over tax the engine to benefit from full power.
Any reprogram is simply a rewrite of the hard code on your car’s ECU. It should be noted that if you do this to newer car, you’ll probably void any manufacturer’s warranty. I also swapped of my factory diesel injector nozzles with larger ones that created a more uniform spray pattern, thus more complete combustion (ie., power) in the cylinders.
Those two modifications alone garnered me a 40% increase in torque to well over 200 ft-lb, or approaching the useable power of a Subaru WRX, in my previously sedate, 90 hp diesel Jetta. To confidently handle this increase in power, I installed rear heavy duty Bilstein shocks myself, had my mechanic install front Bilstein struts and finished out the suspension work with a rear anti-sway bar and 16” Volkswagen BBS mesh wheels purchased used on ebay.com. All told, the modifications and labor set me back less than $2,500 and have given me the most fun to drive car I have ever owned.
By running B99 biodiesel in the summer (99% biodiesel) and B50 biodiesel in the winter (50% biodiesel for temperatures 20-40 degrees F), I have radically decreased my purchase of petroleum, create 50% less carbon dioxide per mile driven than a diesel or gasoline car, have only minimally impacted my mileage and can say eco-powered performance sedan without snickering.
So what happened to Rudolf Diesel after the creation of his revolutionary engine nearly 110 years ago?
On September 29, 1913, while in Antwerp, Diesel boarded the SS Dresden ferry to cross the North Sea. The next morning, the steward discovered that Diesel's cabin was empty. Diesel's body was found in the Scheldt river on October 18.
A theory in the death of Diesel is based around the hope that his engine would provide power using alternative/cheaper/greener fuels. This revolutionary thinking may have scared some oil investors. Rudolf Diesel said, "The use of vegetable oils for engine fuels may seem insignificant today. But such oils may become in course of time as important as petroleum and the coal tar products of the present time."
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