I've finally bought a diesel car
Posted by DavidM in Driving | 14 December 2006
After first writing about changing my petrol car for a diesel car in August it's taken me a stupidly long time to actually make the change, for various mundane reasons.
But finally, last Wednesday, I traded in my 1.8 litre Audi TT sportscar for a 1.9 litre Audi A6 estate diesel.
Why? First, because our old car was getting too small for every day use let alone family camping trips. Second because, although the TT did a respectable 32 mpg I wanted to lower my emissions from driving - especially as I will be doing higher mileage for work next year.
I'm unclear whether moving to diesel itself is an improvement. Over the 300 miles I've done in the last 8 days I've achieved 45 mpg - a near 50% increase on the TT. But I have a feeling diesel is more polluting than petrol.
However, the main reason for moving to diesel is so I can start using biodiesel. When I looked at this earlier in the year I'm sure biodiesel was slightly cheaper than regular diesel. However, when I had a look last week most suppliers seemed to be more expensive.
There are also problems with finding a local retailer. At the moment it looks like I'm going to have a 90 minute drive just to get the fuel.
Although it will be cheaper in bulk, I want to test it by adding half a tank of biodiesel first to make sure it's okay. So I need to find somewhere I can buy 30 litres now then go back and get a big delivery.
I'll have a more thorough search for suppliers and tell you about it in another post.
So I'm halfway to greener driving.
