Hybrid cars have been the focus of a lot of people bent on having more efficient automobiles for a while now, but why do they all run on gasoline? Its seemed obvious to me for a while that diesel engines have always been where hybrid cars should go, its just that in North America, most people avoid diesel and gas stations often don't have it.
Diesel engines from what I know have always been more tunable to run very efficiently at specific speeds and are therefore a much better choice for generators in general (and are often used in that capacity). Using a fixed-speed diesel engine to generate electricity for a hybrid vehicle seems obvious, and its been done for both city buses and the military HMMV.
It would seem though that someone has taken matters into their own hands, as seen at redlightracing.org (possibly off-line from heavy traffic), documenting how a tinkerer has replaced the gasoline engine in his Honda Insight with a Diesel. From his own story submission to the discussion site Slashdot:
On a 3,000 mile cross-country shakedown journey the car averaged 92mpg over 1,800 miles. Around a very hilly town in Northwest Washington, the car is averaging 78mpg.
Maybe we can hope such a thing will become available on a mass scale in the future.
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