The Trap is Sprung

And now it's time to do the same to gas engines.

It is proposed - the step before it is ordered - that they be fitted with particulate traps, the same equipment that already saddles all passenger vehicle diesel engines made since about 2018 (and many commercial/heavy-truck diesel engines, too). These capture soot particles resulting from the combustion of diesel fuel.

Diesel particulate traps - and Diesel Exhaust Fluid (DEF) injection/after-treatment - have made diesel more expensive to buy and to operate. The traps must be purged - "regenerated" - regularly and DEF added regularly. Diesel fuel is also now more expensive than gasoline. It was the reverse until just a few years ago. The result has been that diesel engines are less appealing to consumers, who once bought them to save rather than spend money. And this - along with the almost-impossibility of complying with ever-more-demanding exhaust emissions standards - is why it is almost impossible to find a new car (or even a light truck) that is available with a diesel engine in the U.S. anymore.

Burning gasoline can create soot as well - but usually this is the result of a fault, such as an overly rich air-fuel mixture, which also wastes gas as such an engine is burning inefficiently. This almost never happens with a modern gas-burning engine unless it is in very poor tune and even then, the catalytic converters (plural, almost all cars made since the early 2000s have two, even cars with four cylinder engines) will burn off most of the unwanted byproducts.

The electronic fuel injection systems all cars have had since the mid-late 1980s precisely control and maintain the optimum air-fuel ratio for any given operating condition and if a fault develops, the system will alert the vehicle's owner to the fact via the "check engine' light that will come on if such a fault is detected.

EFI is why a modern car might need a tune-up once every 100,000 miles or so. The spark plugs - the electrodes - will eventually wear but it is rare for them to foul - as was commonly a reason for annual (or even bi-annual) tune-ups before the advent of EFI.

It is also why a modern, fuel-injected engine (which is all engines installed in cars since the late 1980s) produces very little in the way of harmful emissions - i.e., the byproducts of an out-of-tune engine. One of the great secrets - deliberately kept - about modern fuel-injected engines is precisely that they produce hardly any harmful emissions. To the tune - if you like - of better than 98 percent of what comes out of the tailpipe of a new or recent-year car being other than harmless water vapor and carbon dioxide. The latter oilily re-defined as an "emission" so as to re-set the bar for what meets the standard of "zero emissions."

A standard that - conveniently - only electric cars can meet.

And now gas-burning engines have a soot problem, too.

A problem created by direct injection (DI) which has largely replaced EFI . . . as an expedient to help automakers comply with increasingly impossible-to-comply-with fuel economy standards. These latter have become so onerous that any new car that doesn't average close to 36 miles-per-gallon is a liability for the automaker in that it drags down the automaker's "corporate" or fleet average miles-per-gallon number, derived by averaging the city-highway numbers achieved by all the vehicles it makes. Thus a difference of as little as 2-3 miles-per-gallon can make a big difference in terms of complying with the "corporate" or fleet-average fuel efficiency requirements.

DI is responsible for that difference. Also, another one.

Soot.

Direct-injected engines produce more of it, especially if they do not have an additional EFI circuit to spray gas on the back of the engine's intake valves, which will crud up with carbon if not. In an engine fed gas using EFI, the injectors - which are placed above the cylinder, typically just behind the intake valves - wash down the backs of the valves as the gas is injected into the cylinder. This solvent action keeps the backs of the valves from crudding up and keep soot production to a minimum. EFI engines do not need particulate traps.

But direct-injected engines do - or so they say.

In a direct-injected engine, the injector sprays fuel directly into the cylinder, under extremely high (2,000-plus pounds) of pressure (as opposed to the usual 30 psi or so in an EFI system). There is no solvent-washing effect, which is why some DI engines also have a "dedicated" EFI circuit in addition (or rather on top of) DI that is there only to spritz the intake valves with gas, to prevent them from crudding up.

But the relevant thing is the exhaust of a direct-injected engine tends to have more soot. Not so much that you can see - or that causes any tangible harm - but enough to serve as an excuse. The one that is being used to "call" for particulate traps to be made mandatory for gas-engined cars. They already are in Europe - and what's happening there is likely coming here.

Including more expense -  both to buy (only another couple hundred bucks added to the MSRP!) and to drive.

This won't benefit anyone except those peddling - and pushing - electric vehicles, those supposedly "zero emissions" vehicles. Which are that in the same way that what is taken out of every paycheck you get is a "contribution" to Social Security. The point of it is also similar, in a sense.

That being to impoverish you by taking something away from you - in this case, affordable cars that aren't electric cars.

. . .

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