How come diesel fuel enables the car to drive further than regular gasoline would?
In: Engineering
In short, diesel provides more efficient burning. What that means is that diesel has a bigger energetic potential, thus requiring a smaller amount of it to produce the same amount of horsepower and torque a gasoline engine would.
If you need less fuel to produce the same numbers, you save a lot and can drive much further.
Diesel is about 15% denser than gasoline (7 lb/gallon vs 6 lb/gallon), so gallon-for-gallon there’s more fuel to burn.
Diesel engines are much higher compression than gasoline engines. At diesel engine pressures, gasoline will detonate instead of igniting properly, and the higher velocity and pressure of the explosion can erode or break engine parts. Higher compression means higher temperatures, and the amount of energy recoverable from a heat engine goes up in proportion to the peak temperature.
TL;DR: diesel has more fuel per gallon and **can be used in more efficient engines.
**A friend of mine has an old John Deere that can run on gasoline or kerosene/diesel/jet fuel. The compression is low, so there’s no efficiency benefit and it burns less well. There was a time that kerosene was cheap enough that it was a good idea.
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