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Right now, I can't think of a
reason why anyone wouldn’t love this motorcar. It’s a handsome, balanced looking
car. It is really pretty quick for a generous-sized German sedan, at 6.8 seconds
to 60 mph (quicker than the gasoline E 320). It has bags of torque. It handles
beautifully, with a nice combination of steering, suspension, and road feel. It
has a commodious, attractive, and comfortable interior. It has a huge trunk. And
it gets great fuel mileage, even if you flog it hard (more on this
below).
Rudolph’s return
But it’s a diesel, you say,
a diesel, how can anyone love a diesel? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms? Aren’t diesels
practical, economical, stolid, unemotional, ahem, unpleasant? Not hardly, not
any more.
Let’s do diesel first. And by the way,
diesel is diesel because of Rudolph Diesel (1858–1913) who thought up the
compression-ignition system.
This new model year 2005 E320 CDI (for
common-rail direct injection) is the first such entry since Mercedes-Benz quit
diesels here in 1999. In that interim period of time, it was a quiet but fertile
one for key diesel technology, including the development of common-rail diesels.
In common-rail direct diesel injection, the common “rail,” essentially a pipe
that looks kind of like a simplified flute, is under constant pumped pressure,
at upwards of 20,000 psi, and very precise injectors fed by it squirt fuel
directly into the combustion chambers,
where there are no spark plugs necessary, owing to the exceptional compression
of air and fuel in diesels. The holy grail in high-pressure common-rail diesel
direct injection is rapidity, precision, and controllability of injection
“events,” so combustion chamber phenomena can be very precisely modulated and
controlled. CDI reduces combustion noise as well as creating smooth and complete
combustion, with lowered NOX emissions.
Given the move forward with CDI and the coming of superior,
low-sulfur fuels to the U.S. later in the decade, diesels may be poised for
rapid growth here. Once both are in place, there will no longer be any reason
not to drive a diesel — no more smoke or smell, no more rattling or crunching
noises associated with diesel engines. The only thing that would signal “diesel”
— the only thing — is more low-end torque than you are used to. That, and maybe
the fact that you can go from L.A. to San Francisco and back again on a single
tank of fuel.
