The diesel is coming, the diesel is coming

The diesel engine is reaching maturity before our eyes and noses, thanks in part to diesel particulate filters and high-pressure fuel injection.

New technologies can be intimidating to the average consumer, maybe even more so in the economic environment of the past couple of years. We want what we spend our hard-earned money on to last, and we want it to be the best there is, if sometimes we don't really know what “it” is.

The irony is that some recent automotive “new technologies,” such as continuously variable transmissions, some electronics features, and diesel engines, have been around longer than the Model T. In those years intervening-between birth and maturity-consumers suffered because these technologies were not mature when introduced by forward-thinking engineers, and thus left a bad taste, sometimes literally, in consumers' mouths.