SOME FACTS ABOUT DIESEL ENGINES

Fuel passes through the injector jets at speeds of nearly 1500 miles per hour (2400 km/h) – as fast as the top speed of a jet plane.
Fuel is injected into the combustion chamber in less than 1.5 milliseconds (one and a half thousandths of a second) – about as long as a camera flash.
The smallest quantity of fuel injected is one cubic millimetre – about the same volume as the head of a pin. The largest injection quantity at the moment for automobile diesel engines is around 70 cubic millimetres.
If the camshaft of a six-cylinder engine is turning at 4500 rpm, the injection system has to control and deliver 225 injection cycles per second.
On a demonstration drive, a Volkswagen 1-liter diesel-powered car used only 0.89 liters of fuel in covering 100 kilometers – making it probably the most fuel-efficient car in the world. Bosch’s high-pressure fuel injection system was one of the main factors behind the prototype’s extremely low fuel consumption. Production record-breakers in fuel economy include the Volkswagen Lupo 3L TDI and the Audi A2 3L 1.2 TDI with standard consumption figures of 3 liters of fuel per 100 kilometers. Their high-pressure diesel injection systems are also supplied by Bosch.
In 2001, nearly 36% of newly registered cars in Western Europe had diesel engines. Austria leads the league table of registrations of diesel-powered cars with 66%, followed by Belgium with 63% and Luxembourg with 58%. Germany, with 34.6% in 2001, was in the middle of the league table. By way of comparison: in 1996, diesel-powered cars made up only 15% of the new car registrations in Germany.
In 1998, for the very first time in the history of the legendary 24-hour race at the Nürburgring, a diesel-powered car was the overall winner – the BMW works team 320d, fitted with modern high-pressure diesel injection technology from Bosch.