It's an illusion that diesel vehicles are faster than gasoline. Gasoline engines have way more horsepower and are faster that the diesel options (unless Germans are getting neutered or smaller power plants than say, the USA)
That's a strange statement. More horsepower based on what? I think if you look around, you'll see that the largest and highest horsepower combustion engines all burn diesel. Semi-trailers are exclusively diesel.
Your statement on speed is also odd. Record setting cars may burn gas, but your typical car driving around a city or highway needn't ever go faster than 160km/h. Most cars can achieve this, and most modern cars, whether diesel or gas, can achieve this without much difficulty.
This leaves us with acceleration, where diesel vs gas is equally unclear. As small diesel engines often ship with turbos, you'd be perhaps comparing a turbocharged 2.0L diesel vs a normally aspirated 2.0L gas engine. Assuming roughly equivalent mass of the cars, with higher low-end torque, the diesel will win just about any street race.
If what you're comparing is purchase price to acceleration, then indeed the gas cars may win.
This is really wrong. It's a weird myth that gets perpetuated in America where people don't really drive diesels.
Let's compare a 2.0L diesel Golf TDI to a 2.0L petrol Golf GTI. Same car, same displacement, both turbo engines.
The Golf TDI does 0-60 in 9.0s and a quarter mile of 17.0s@84 mph.
The Golf GTI does 0-60 in 5.7s and a quarter mile of 14.2s@100 mph.
There's a staggering difference in performance there. The TDI is so slow that it's genuinely difficult to find a Motor Trend instrument test on a slower car, because at that point, it's too slow to really bother.
I found the 2018 Rav4: 0-60 in 9.3s and a quarter mile of 17.0@82.
If you want to do this comparison please do it right: The Diesel equivalent to the Golf GTI is the Golf GTD. There's more than just displacement that makes up an engine and the fact that is some kind of turbocharger.
Their difference in 0-60 seems to be 6.4s vs 7.4s according to what I find. Guess the difference in higher regions might be even less, because of a different torque profile in turbocharged diesel engines.
The GTD is Euro-only, so it's harder to get performance comparisons. But it's still much slower than the GTI, I found a 15.6@93 in the quarter.
0-60 is an awful way to measure acceleration; most of what it measures in modern cars is traction, since a Mk7 GTI will shred the front tires with a hard launch. So high five second and low six second times are both accurate, it just depends how good the launch was.
That's why you compare quarter mile times when looking at acceleration. And the GTI is still so much faster than the GTD; a full second and a half and 7mph trap. Meaning, in a drag race, the GTD wouldn't be close enough to read the GTI's license plate.
I think the 0-40 profile would be much more favorable to the TDI, and much more useful to the typical driver. But we'll never really know as that's not the standard measurement.
The diesel golf is still a lot slower to 40 than the GTI. The TDI diesel has a lot of turbo lag, a narrow powerband, and poor gearing. What people who've never owned diesel cars fail to realize is, that peak torque number is hugely misleading. It sounds impressive, but it starts from like 2200RPMs and falls off a cliff past 3500. While a (modern) turbocharged petrol engine has full torque by ~1800rpms and that lasts until like 5000rpms.
I've owned a (Jetta) TDI before, I even tried to make it fast. Even with a tune and full exhaust it was slower than a stock turbo petrol.
It's always Americans that talk about how awesome diesels are. I never see posts from Europeans (who are the ones that actually have to drive them) talking up diesels. They are always complaining about how terrible they are.
This comment makes no sense. I'm saying diesel engines are bad for performance. It's not physically possible to make a diesel 1.6L engine that produces F1 levels of power, they just can't spin fast enough.
The comment make sense, since I'm saying "[i]f it were true [that diesels easily beat gasoline burners in a street race], Formula-1 would use nothing but diesel engines [which they don't at all]."
