Until a few years back, diesel engine cars were very popular in Pakistan as well as globally and with advancements in the technology people thought diesel engines are the future of motoring due to their tendency to be more efficient than petrol engines. Many European countries even incentivized the use of diesel engines. For example, in France the diesel is less expensive than petrol and almost 80% of cars run on it.
Things are changing now. Governments are realizing that Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions of the modern diesel engines may have been lower, however, the exhaust of a diesel engine throws out much more deadly stuff than CO2, including Nitrogen oxide (NO2), which causes respiratory issues along with various lung and heart diseases.
Although diesel engine cars have filters put in their exhausts to filter out these deadly gasses, but these filters restrict the performance of the vehicles and most owners remove those filters in favor of performance due to which the level of NO2 exceeds far beyond the level which the human lungs can cope up with.
In big metropolitans of developed countries, the caretakers of the cities are taking extreme measures to cut the NO2 emissions caused by diesel engines. The Mayor of Paris has plans to eradicate the use of diesel engines the by the year 2020, for a country like France where a large number of vehicles run on diesel, this is kind of a big deal.
The Mayor of London is not far behind either. He plans to double the congestion charge for diesel engines. Some analysts believe that London may ban the usage of diesel engine cars in the not-so-distant future.
If measures like these put into effect then the future of diesel engines is in grave danger. Either automakers have to put in a lot of efforts to improve the diesel engines or the future generations may not be able to enjoy the low-end torque and black smoke.
However, people in Pakistan do not need to fret over this. We do not have any effective laws regarding emissions, and even if some laws are introduced, the extreme usage of CNG in large commercial diesel vehicles would nullify those laws and regulations.
