After all the hubub this past year about the great advances in Bosch fuel injection technology, it is no surprise to hear about…

BLUETEC diesel technology, which will make its U.S. debut this fall on the 2007 Mercedes E 320 sedan. DaimlerChrysler says BLUETEC is so clean it can meet emissions regulations in all 50 states, including the five states where diesels aren’t currently sold because they can’t meet emissions standards: California, Massachusetts, Maine, New York and Vermont.

That’s encouraging, but of course Mercedes has some of the most advanced diesel engineering in the world. This isn’t your grandma’s grumbling, smelly clunker, we’re talking about. Personally, I’m curious whether the 2.5L V6 turbo-diesel quattro Audi Allroad will finally be imported — talk about the ultimate active-lifestyle high mpg with comfort road-warrior vehicle, it’s almost enough to make you want to move to Canada, eh? Ok, ok, I never said I was good at marketing.

Back to engineering, the article explains…

…diesels are 30 percent more efficient than gas engines, and unlike gas-electric hybrids, which get better fuel economy in city driving, diesels are equally efficient on the highway.

And diesel-electric hybrid? Even the HumVee is going to DEH (rebranded the Shadow RST-V), according to military.com. They wax poetic about “going green”, but let’s face it, dependence on fuel is a giant security vulnerability issue — the more efficient a vehicle the less risk to soldiers from a supply chain.

Special Forces are about the only group that bother with any real concept of environmental friendliness since it plays to their favor, whereas Army is about mowing down and establishing control, Sherman style, but I digress.

The AP article about the Mercedes and new diesel technology also mentions:

…a big boost this October, when U.S. diesel retailers are required to begin selling low-sulfur diesel. In the past, diesel could have a sulfur level of up to 500 parts per million; low-sulfur diesel has no more than 15 parts per million.

The real question for the future is whether car manufacturers will start allowing pure-veg-oil to run in their vehicles rather than whether someone can improve petro production by reducing a toxic additive. The additive was introduced in the first place to get rid of the inherent shortcomings of petro-diesel versus the bio alternative.

Of course less sulfur is better and should have been forced years ago, but the real solution is to move away from overly centralized distribution and refinement and proprietary assets that have artificially high (protected) value.

When information started being pushed around on workstations and PCs it exploded the processing market. When fuel creation can be localized in a similar fashion then we will really see advances in energy technology and a drop in risk. It’s like the shift from mainframes (petroleum production) to the PC (bio-diesel refinement), which again creates a whole new set of security issues (more resilience, but need for managing decentralized controls).

How many “vehicles of the future” really make it to our driveway? I seem to remember something about the rocket-powered highway concept cars from the 1950s. Don’t see many of those around, although I think a home-built version was the basis of the original Darwin Award.

GMC has stepped-up to the plate with their GMC PAD design. The name suggests an acronym of some sort, but actually it so far appears to be a General Motors Corporation (GMC) PAD, as in “hey baby, let’s chill out in my hip pad that looks like a worm on wheels”.

The usual story is that technology brings the elite lifestyle to the masses. You might say temperature controls, food, clothing, transportation, personal hygene, etc. are better now for the average person than for kings and queens of hundreds of years ago. I mention this because the GMC PAD seems like a fancy version of a Winnebago at best, and a fancy version of what a homeless person who lives in his/her car might imagine as something to make their plight less painful. Some might call this the ultimate in homeless living.

In fact, I’ll go out on a limb here and say that the idea of roving homes with little/no attachment to the land is based in rural and expansive cultures that want to explore beyond their own acreage, or who have no hopes of owning a plot (like ocean cruisers). It does not fit the urban cramped-space model at all, where people live 50 stories above ground due to the cost of space. So unless sky-scraping parking garages will become the condo infrastructure of the future this is definitely NOT the direction that most people say we’re headed in terms of efficient use of land and resources. More to the point, the PAD brochures claim that this vehicle has a “skydeck for enjoying the sights and sounds of LA culture”. Wow. They talk as if people today are trying to build observation points on their homes to get a better view of LA. They certainly could do so, but I suspect the thing that’s stopping the vast majority has something to do with the fact that LA is more about subsistance and stripping the land of its value for personal gain, rather than any kind of beautification or public and scenic downtown, let alone a park system for the common folk to enjoy from their back window (without some ultra-intense police flashlight in their rear-view mirror).

The suggestion that this vehicle could be used for disaster response and emergency housing makes a bit more sense, but usually people look for rapid-deployment materials that don’t cost several hundred thousands of dollars and include a power-hungry “media rich environment”. You wouldn’t want to drop one of these off the back of a C-130.

There is brief mention of an “endless variety of entertainment, information and security options” but no details. Bulletproof? Encrypted signals? Radiation proof? Air filtering? Speaking of security, here’s a loophole in regulation I’ve seen people use in the LA area — run a business out of a vehicle on private property. The Department of Transportation doesn’t have jurisdiction over the private property and the rest of the agencies don’t have jurisdiction over vehicles, so if you’re clever enough you can drive your GMC PAD right through some kind of crack in regulations, while it lasts. And with those Hummer-friendly tax loopholes this ultra-luxury vehicle becomes a complete “business” write-off. Now that might be appealing to the LA-elite.

Well, at the end of the day as the sun sets behind the PAD, the best part is that it runs on diesel-electric hybrid, which is excellent news because it suggests someone at GMC may be contemplating this awesome power-plant for mass production. In fact, if it were up to me, I’d rather put that kind of engine technology in the new VW GX3 “motorcyle”, pictured to the left, and pull a little trailer that transforms into livable space. At least then you could go out for a drive in the mountains without hauling your laundry.