Still no particles-fighting yet.
Add their climate effect to that of the CO2 emissions and what do you get? A hemi pickup?
Toyota got to be proud of trying to be the very last company to employ the necessary measures.

I find it interesting that the notoriously heavy Land Cruiser gets by in Europe with only 173hp/302lb-ft in a diesel engine. My Jeep CRD, a smaller SUV, has virtually same output from its VM Motori I-4 turbodiesel, and is not considered even remotely fast by NA standards. My point is not that the Land Cruiser is underpowered - instead, that here in North America a lot of our vehicles are overpowered, and perhaps not everyone needs 200 or even 300hp to go to work and the grocery store.

I think Zach has hit the nail on the head. Why do americans need such huge overpowered cars ?
I suppose because fuel is so cheap.
If you are paying $5 / gallon you soon relax your 0-60 standards and get over the need for a nice V8 rumble.

mahonj wrote: Also, are particulates greenhouse "gases" ?
I thought they just gave people lung diseases (Cancer, asthma etc.)

No, particulates are not gases, and they don't contribute to the GH effect. Quite the opposite, actually. They reflect photons and provide global cooling. And they give people lung diseases. I would hazard a guess that not all particles are equally harmful, however. A carbonaceous diesel particle laced with carcinogenic Polynuclear Aromatic Hydrocarbons is probably more likely to cause cancer than a sulfate aerosol, but that's just a speculation on my part.

One of the fantastic things about the Vette is it's drag coefficient, something like .27, which is near "hybrid" territory. That, and driveline efficiency/gearing are why they can pull nearly 30mpg highway. What would be nice is the V8 TDI in the Toureg slapped in something a little smaller than the Vette, but built along the same sports car lines, with the same seating layout/aerodyamics as the Loremo. It'd probably see 80-100mpg in mixed driving, seat four, and blow the doors of off the Vette so long as weight was kept down. It's a shame auto makers keep weight increases in near lockstep with horsepower and efficiency increases. Almost any motor today would be fun in a 1500-2000lb car.

Zach -

diesel SUVs are more efficient than gasoline SUVs, which no-one in their right mind would buy in Europe. Fuel is just too expensive for that. However, just because it's got a diesel does not mean an SUV is suddenly a good idea. Especially if it doesn't even feature a DPF.

Wrt horsepower, a gasoline engine will always beat a diesel of the same displacement because it can rev much higher. However, Joe Average lets his engine putter away at 1500-3000 RPM anyhow, and in that range turbocharged diesels offer substantially greater maximum torque than naturally aspirated gasoline engines of similar displacement. In addition to more efficient thermodynamics, you can program the transmission to shift up earlier to avoid the high internal friction losses of low-load operation.

Vesplease -

Audi will introduce a toned-down version of their 12-cylinder racing diesel from Le Mans as the top-end option for their Q7 in Europe. Afaik, there are no plans to also make it available in their new R8 sports car.

Five excerpted pix, handy to start with:

http://img300.imageshack.us/img300/9528/85yj.jpg

showing that where the masses
( and mass reductions with the cheap filters )
are, the numbers unfortunately aren't found.
The foreseeable future (Euro-6, I hope) means efforts in reducing number concentrations, not just laisser-faire mass concentrations.
UNECE GRPE PMP my ride
( good to start with, but in german, unfortunately: the latter one at
http://www.empa.ch/plugin/template/empa/23/20988?tfid=23&detail=1&det_tfid=23&newsearch=0 )

http://img88.imageshack.us/img88/3499/ece0zr.jpg
http://img26.exs.cx/img26/2637/adac3ke.jpg
http://img45.imageshack.us/img45/2817/rush13mf.jpg
http://img47.imageshack.us/img47/2408/rush30kk.jpg

Let's start counting instead of bashing and weighing ;)

I quite don't understand why Toyota don't put the 2,2D4D/177hp diesel engine (from Avensis D-CAT) on LC. It has similar specifications (power/torque) at a higher mpg and a much lower pollution (Euro5).
This situation I also saw at other manufacturers: engines in small cars are often more powerfull than engines in SUV's.

Its higher mileage is in the smaller car that is lighter, has lower wind drag and can get along with 2WD, skinny driveshafts, clutch, diff, small wheels... and so on. Not in the engine in this regard. SUVs are built
for different tasks - therefore the trendy crossovers inbetween the two - which require different approaches.
Small cars' engines don't work in bigger vehicles. Not even fuel efficiently for the short time they do live up in there, as already mentioned above.
They would have to be purpose-built, more than just adapted, having almost nothing in common with their nominally alike breathren then, just as the Q7s engine of course is not a detuned LeMans-engine - almost no connection, marketing aside.
And one even had to include energy needed in production of components, if he fitted two or three of the little ones throughout the life of the vehicle.
1000hp in a race car you get out of 2.0 litres.
1000hp in a heavy hauler you get out of 19 litres and
1000hp in a tank you get out of 38.88 litres. And your usual 212g/kWh.

http://chtz-uraltrac.com/catalog/items/19.php

Same difference between an Avensis and a Land Cruiser.
The Avensis' engine can be had in the RAV4, where it is okay.

As I wrote: In the heavier cars the lighter engines in competition even consume more fuel for most of existing and therefore relevant usage profiles.
Proven a thousand times throughout the world of 4x4s.

They just have to fit their filters!
Then we can talk grams of CO2, but no sooner between diesel and petrol. The greenness of diesels is our european esoteric diesel-marketing. Nothing more up until honest filtration, just starting now.

And as always: DME would be fine.

Because the smaller engine will probably have to work harder to shift the SUV.