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Ah, for mod points.

It's a good point. Alfa Romeo left the US market several years ago. Peugeot as well. Now, there's more to selling a car in the US than just setting up a shingle, granted. But Tesla seems to be making good money selling low volume and high profit without the dealership network. What's to keep, say, Alfa Romeo from establishing an Internet presence in the US and selling their cars here?

According to this article diesel is expensive and electric is expensive making the resulting hybrid REALLY expensive. If you still want one it looks like the Peugot they reference is a go although not in the US.

If you truly want to go the diesel/electric route you could order this kit and build a striking auto (technically a 3 wheel motorcycle) that gets over 200 miles to the gallon. And at ~$20,000 for the build it is still economical. I just wish they would have followed through with their plans to manufacture and sell these bad boys!

This (in the 100% electric section, flash app warning) claims it has two 125kW motors on both front and rear axels, unless I'm mistaken, making it 4WD, yes?

I've never been a car guy, so feel free to correct.

The Peugeot 5008 has a distance alert. I've been driving it for 4 months now, and I'm quite happy with it, apart from the fact that eats 8.0 - 8.5 liters / 100 km (27.6 - 29.4 miles per gallon according to google).

Actually, there are millions of people who really do need a larger vehicle.

Right. However what they need is not a 4x4 or a pickup truck. What they need is something like this (or a smaller version thereof).

Well, Peugeot does have a Diesel/Hybrid technology demonstrator right now:
Hybrid HDi Engine

On the other hand, I heard Toyota dismissed the option as being too expensive and heavy. (The hybrid powertrain already adds plenty of weight and cost!)

I would rather ask: how come there is no gas turbine/hybrid powertrain? A gas turbine would be energy efficient, would greatly reduce weight, and would probably be cheaper than a gasoline engine when mass produced. This is not a new idea, I remember a design like that discussed on "Science" magazine in the early Eighties.

I also rode on the bike team in college, so i got a vehicle that could carry my bike inside if needed.

I own a Peugeot 206 , which is not a large car by any measure. It easily fits two adult-sized mountain bikes, backpacks, equipment, spares etc for a full day's riding with the back seat folded down. Amazing what can fit a small hatchback of around half the mass of an SUV and probably 2-3 times better fuel economy ;-)

I read Slashdot in Paris, at the Peugeot showroom at the Champs-Élysées.

As the kiosk had no keyboard, I had to :
- find a way to launch Internet Explorer window with an address bar
- find a way to launch CharMap to type characters (there was no right button on the mouse to just copy chars from web pages)

The worst problem about Diesel engines is the noise. At cruising speed the racket is terrible. They're ideal for agricultural vehicles, but not for the casual road user.

Soot remains the big problem. Sure, this can be reduced by using things like selenium-based filters, but the jury is still out as to whether the cure is worse than what it sets out to fix. (What does widespread selenium dispersal mean to the environment?

Diesel motors were originally a handy method for disposing of all the garbage at the end of the refinery process that is uneconomically viable to deal with. The European motor companies have spent a small fortune over the past couple of decades improving the Diesel engine.

Peugeot is a company that springs to mind. They have invested billions, and have successfully lobbied the French government to keep taxes low on distillate so that they may sell more engines and thus recoup the investments.

They have been so successful in promoting Diesel technology that France currently has a deficit in distillate production and is obliged to import the damned stuff in order to cover domestic demand.

Another problem is that in order to get high performance out of a Diesel engine the engineers have long resorted to adding turbochargers... which adds to the complexity of the engine. Even without a turbo, Diesel engines remain complex, finicky beasts to maintain. Even with subsidised fuel prices, you have to rack up a lot of mileage for it to be economically viable.

A better alternative? Liquid Petroleum Gas (a.k.a. LPG).

Here in the Netherlands almost every station sells LPG too, but I'm afraid in the larger part of the world, it's not really popular yet. The only marque I know to sell cars with an LPG-installation is Volvo, they sell most of their cars in a Bi-Fuel-version.

Problem with LPG, apart from the availability, is the reach of a tank: 300km on one tank is about as far as you get (although Volvo claims their cars run as far on LPG as on normal fuel), while my Peugeot 306 diesel runs over 800km on a tank. Of course I'm talking about European cars, I don't know how things are Down Under.

Different problem is the place of the LPG-tank. Until recently, the only way to have your car breathe LPG was to insert a huge gas tank in your trunk. Now that's a very serious reason not to choose LPG. Nowadays, most cars can be equipped with a nicely hidden tank: usually in the place of the spare wheel. Which gives another problem: you can't drive without a spare wheel (at least, not here), so you need to store that one somewhere else. Sure, you can get such a small one with which you can't drive over 80km/h, but still...

So sure, LPG is a nice alternative, but I think it's a little far-fetched to state that it's the way to go. I'd rather have a fuel-cell in my car, or an engine that runs on hydrogen and produces nothing but water. But I'm afraid it's going to take some time before we see that kind of engines appear in normal cars.

That doesn't really make sense, comparing a 20-years-old diesel car to a modern day petrol car. I never drove an American diesel, but concluding from what I read here, American diesels aren't nearly as good as their European colleagues. I was used to a petrol drinking car (Citroën BX, production ceased years ago, unfortunately) when I got my first company car, an Opel Corsa. Of course, equipped with a diesel engine. I admit, it was a little noisy, especially when cold, but it ran smoothly. I particularly liked the character of it: it's not as jumpy as a petrol engine. I'm sure my neighbours didn't like the car when I started it in the morning, after a freezing cold night, because of the thick blue-grey clouds that it threw into the air during the first 10-20 seconds. But as soon as the engine had the right temperature, no more smoke.

So far the old diesel. Now for the new ones. Of course you've heard of common rail technology, almost every marque has one these days, at least in Europe. Ford still doesn't have one in the new Mondeo, but that'll change soon, because the Focus already has one. Volkswagen's turbodiesels have been mentioned a few times already, and for good reasons. The Skoda Octavia uses a 1.9 VW turbodiesel, running an average of 20km per liter (ok, who does the conversions to imperial measures here *grin*) and even 25km/liter at 120km/h. And we're talking a 81kW/110hp engine here. And that's powerful enough for a 1250kg car, I don't need a dragster to go to work.

Famous are the HDi-engines of Peugeot. And, as said before, the more expensive cars of Peugeot (and therefore Citroën, which belongs to Peugeot, see the PSA site) come with a particle-filter, which makes reduces pollution to an extent never seen in diesel engines before. Believe me, I drove a Peugeot 406 diesel and it took a while before I realised it actually was a diesel. It was smooth, powerful and very silent (when I was waiting for a traffic light, I just had to check the rpm-meter to see if it was still running). And with the soot-filter, it's clean, simply check the data sheets of the engine and compare it to diesels without such a filter. And you can start right away, no need to wait for glowing spirals to become hot first. Even more silent was the Renault Laguna with 1.9 common rail diesel I drove some time ago. It's got 6 gears instead of 5 and when doing 120km/h in 6, the engine runs about 2000rpm. Now that's quiet and economic. Seems impossible to me to do that with a petrol engine, since those things don't perform that well at those speeds.

And now the reason why I think diesel engines do so well here in Europe. Statistics show that more and more cars are being leased. And what's interesting then is the cost per km. And in that regard, diesels have two important advantages: they run longer than petrol engines and they cost a lot (yes, a lot) less in fuel: consumption is less and the price of diesel is a lot lower (2.80 Dutch guilders for a liter RON95 petrol and only 1.70 for a liter diesel). Although I have to mention the efforts of our fine government to change that. For the sake of environment, they say, but more for the Treasury's sake I believe. After all, 2.80 (1.08 US dollars) for a liter of petrol isn't a normal price either. So maybe, if those bandits that call themselves ministers get their way, diesel engines may become less and less attractive. But until then, I'm happy to drive a diesel.