The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; Diesel Engines

ROBERT MacNEIL: Good evening. Suddenly we`re in the midst of a fuel shortage again, shortage of unleaded gas for cars. Some companies, like Shell, have been rationing deliveries to dealers, and there`s talk of an early price increase of two to three cents a gallon. The oil companies say it`s because unusually fine fall weather made people drive more, and some refineries couldn`t keep pace with the demand. But the government sees the problem as more serious. The President`s chief inflation fighter, Alfred Kahn, told Congress today that he`s asking the Wage-Price Council to examine whether the current shortage was connected with the regulation of gas prices.

All this has brought the question of fuel economy back with a vengeance. Transportation Secretary Brock Adams told Detroit auto makers yesterday that the fuel economy standards they`re striving to meet by 1985, an average fleet performance of twenty-seven and a half miles a gallon, is not going to be good enough. He called automobile manufacturers to a summit conference with government to design the automobile of the future.

All this gives added point to the recent announcement by General Motors that it is, greatly expanding production of diesel engines, which get more miles per gallon from cheaper fuel. But there are many ifs in that proposition, as we examine tonight. Jim Lehrer is off. Charlayne HunterGault`s in Washington. Charlayne?

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Robin, this current controversy is new, but the diesel, an invention of the Germans, has been around for years. They have been used mainly in trucks, buses, trains and boats, but Peugeot has used them in cars since 1928 and Mercedes has also used them for decades. Last year Volkswagen imported nearly 13,000 diesel-powered Rabbits, and GM put diesels in some of its Oldsmobiles and Cadillacs. As Robin mentioned, the kind of fuel used is one big difference between diesels and gas engines, but so is the way the fuel ignites. In a gasoline engine a carburetor mixes air with gas. At or near maximum compression, an electric spark touches off the mixture and combustion occurs. That drives the pistons and, ultimately, the car. The diesel does not need carburetors, spark plugs or an ignition system, because it heats the air by compression and then adds a spray of fuel to the hot air so that it ignites on contact. Robin?

MacNEIL: For the motorist there are other differences. A diesel engine gets about twenty-five percent better mileage than a ,gasoline engine. The diesel fuel costs a little less, but the diesel engine itself costs from $200 to $800 more. They can last longer, some running up to 300,000 miles and needing fewer tuneups. But the engine is slower starting and the performance noisier and less zippy. As for pollution, the diesel emits little or no carbon monoxide, but it produces higher amounts of nitrogen and particulate matter; and there`s a debate over whether that might be cancer-causing.

Let`s talk to a man from General Motors, the first American auto maker to sell diesel cars. Dr. Fred Bowditch is executive assistant to the vice president in charge of environmental activities at GM. He`s with us in the studios of Public Television Station WTVS in Detroit. Dr. Bowditch, why is GM going so heavily into diesels?

FRED BOWDITCH: Well, you`ve already covered of course a part of it. Our largest concern is to be able to provide the fuel economy that obviously the country needs, and at the same time provide a good mix of automobiles to satisfy the great demand the public has for a wide variety of automobile for their own personal needs.

MacNEIL: That means continuing to be able to make big cars but have fuel economy as well.

BOWDITCH: And still be able to meet the different fuel economy requirements that we have coming down the pike. It`s just another one of the options that we think the public is going to want -- may well demand.

MacNEIL: I`ve seen it put that this is a way, perhaps the only way, of keeping big cars on the road. Can you put it as simply as that?

BOWDITCH: Well, I don`t quite like your term, "big cars", because none of our cars are going to be big ones in terms of what we look at today. They are going to be certainly lighter weight than the ones we have today, even those that we`re going to put the diesels in, when we get to something like 1985, when we have to meet those very stringent emission and fuel requirements.

MacNEIL: What`s the initial reaction been like of the American buying public, do they like them?

BOWDITCH: They like them very much. Up to this point we haven`t been able to build anywhere near enough of them. We find that we`re production- limited, and so we really don`t know what the demand is going to be eventually. But we certainly were not able to make anywhere near enough of them last year, and we`ve tripled production this year just to try and get a real measure of what the market is.

MacNEIL: Are you getting any complaints from purchasers at General Motors about some of the negatives one reads about with diesels, the slower starting than a petrol engine, the relatively sluggish performance, the difficulty of finding the fuel as easily as gasoline?

BOWDITCH: Well, we`ve had precious little in the way of complaints, but perhaps part of that reason may be that we fixed some of those things that you mentioned before we brought out the engine to begin with. For instance, now it takes a much shorter time to start the diesel engine; we`ve been able to change the starting system that`s used. We are also putting in a larger displacement diesel engine so that we don`t have the sluggish performance that you speak about. This has been one of the failures, we think, that some of our foreign competitors have begun by putting in a gasoline-sized engine, making a diesel out of it, and for certain you do get poorer performance. But if I put in a little bit larger displacement engine, then I can get the same performance I had with the gasoline engine.

MacNEIL: I see. For the family driver, when do the advantages, the economies of the price of the fuel and the better mileage and the lower maintenance and everything, when do the graph of those cross over the higher purchase price?

BOWDITCH: Looking at today`s gasoline engine systems and making the calculations on that basis, it`s going to take something of the order of eight or nine years` worth of driving in order to make the costs come out even. But our gasoline engines are becoming much more complicated; and in the very near future, in order to pass some of these emission requirements, it is going to require quite expensive equipment of the order of two or three hundred dollars in addition to the current price of the cars.

MacNEIL: Looking down the future and leaving aside for the moment questions of pollution, which we`re going to get to, which might inhibit production - - looking into that future without those, what percentage ideally would you imagine the GM fleet being between diesel and gasoline, ultimately?

BOWDITCH: Well, of course a good bit of this is going to depend on how acceptable the public finds the installation of the diesel engine; but at the moment our present plans look at something like twenty-five percent of production being equipped with diesel engines in 1985. Now, that`s a maximum. We`re talking about as few as perhaps fifteen percent., So that`s the range that we`re looking at at the moment.

MacNEIL: Well, thank you. Charlayne?

HUNTER-GAULT: While GM has been promoting diesel engines, Ford, the nation`s second largest car manufacturer, has not. Instead, it is developing a modified fuel-efficient gasoline engine called the proco, which stands for "programmed combustion." Thomas Feaheny is Ford`s Vice President of Car Engineering. He, too, is at Public Television Station WTVS in Detroit. Mr. Feaheny, Ford is not that high on diesels. Why not?

THOMAS FEAHENY: Well, I don`t think we`re negative on diesels; we think we may have a better idea. We`ve been working for more years than I have to admit on a device called the proco engine. I have a cutaway section of the cylinder here that might demonstrate it.

HUNTER-GAULT: Can you tell us in very, very simple terms what`s so much better as you demonstrate it?

FEAHENY: It`s a gasoline engine that gets diesel-like fuel economy, will retain the performance and noise and starting characteristics of a gasoline engine and yet get the diesel-like fuel economy. It is a statified-charge engine; I wouldn`t want to get into technical detail on it, but it`s really a different type of an engine. We`re working very hard on it, have been. The real issue is manufacturing feasibility and highvolume production; we`ve not really established that yet.

HUNTER-GAULT: Is this the model that you would prefer to see industry adopt?

FEAHENY: We think it may be a better answer if we can work it out.

HUNTER-GAULT: How far are you along in its development compared with the diesel?

FEAHENY: Well, the diesel is really known technology; the proco is new. We`re going to have a pilot plant operation to establish manufacturing feasibility starting about a year from now. Hopefully by mid-1980 we`ll have been able to confirm production feasibility and go into production about 1983.

HUNTER-GAULT: There`s no chance that Ford has just been caught napping in this, or else it`s just going to let GM go ahead and blaze the trail and take the risk, and if everything works out then you would hop on the bandwagon?

FEAHENY: No, and we`re still concerned about our proco development, and we have a diesel backup program also; if we can`t work out the open issues on proco, we may well go into diesels.

HUNTER-GAULT: An editorial I read today from Automotive News last month stated that if the diesel engine is going to make it, t en the whole industry is going to have to get behind it. Briefly, what is your reaction to that?

FEAHENY: I guess I see nothing wrong with different manufacturers offering the customer a choice.

HUNTER-GAULT: But you don`t feel that it sort of lies on Ford`s shoulders, the whole program, if you don`t get behind it.

FEAHENY: No, I certainly don`t.

HUNTER-GAULT: All right; we`ll come back. Robin?

MacNEIL: Some environmentalists have grave apprehensions about the move to diesels. Brian Ketcham is a vice president of Citizens for Clean Air and a former director of New York City`s Bureau of Motor Vehicle Pollution Control. He recently wrote in the Washin ton Post, "A growing body of evidence suggests that the widespread use these engines could generate enough carcinogens" -- cancer-causing agents -- "to seriously threaten public health." Mr. Ketcham, what`s the evidence for that rather scary suggestion?

BRIAN KETCHAM: Robin, first of all I want to say that we are not against diesels; we simply want to look at them in their total context and determine whether or not they are a health risk. There is a growing body of evidence; I think the evidence that is most relevant is the reaction of government to the disclosure that diesels may indeed cause cancer. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration withdrew its support of diesels in their consideration of fuel economy standards for the 1981-84 model year cars; the EPA has instituted a six-million-dollar investigation of both characterizing what comes out the tailpipe of diesels and what the health consequences of diesel particulate exhaust are. The most recent evidence, I think, is a report that was just released by the Natural Resources Defense Council; they have just put out a newsletter, they say fine particles in the atmosphere are a grave threat to health. It`s a 300- page study, some two years in the making, which defines the problem and spells out some very scary circumstances. I think the other recognition is the Clean Air Act and the fact that it basically ordered EPA to investigate the health consequences of diesel exhaust emissions.

MacNEIL: I`ve seen General Motors citing a study by the University of London which is said to show that people who work around and in diesel buses, of which there are a great many there, had no higher incidence of lung cancer than transit workers on electric vehicles. If diesel exhaust were the danger you suggest, might there not have been some different finding in a study like that?

KETCHAM: Well, there could have been, but epidemiological studies are very difficult to undertake. I`ve not seen the study; what I`ve read about it suggests that they only looked at lung cancer and ignored the potential gastrointestinal problems that can occur from exposure to diesel particulates.

MacNEIL: Do you want diesel production stopped until this is fully investigated and sorted out?

KETCHAM: Well, I think prudence dictates that we go slow until EPA has produced the results of their six-million-dollar study; certainly slow down.

MacNEIL: Is it a question of a very small percentage of diesel cars on the road not being a worry but the worry beginning when the percentage rises and therefore there is more diesel exhaust in the air?

KETCHAM: The real problem occurs in large urban centers. As an example, here in New York City virtually half the fine particulate matter in midtown is produced by diesel buses. Were we to dieselize our taxi fleet and auto fleet, that fine particulate load would increase fivefold.

MacNEIL: Thank you. Charlayne?

HUNTER-GAULT: The governmental unit responsible for testing the health effects of the diesels is the Environmental Protection Agency. Michael Walsh is EPA`s Deputy Assistant Administrator for Mobile Source Air Pollution Control. Mr. Walsh, you just hear Mr. Ketcham a few moments ago talk about how your warnings have stated that diesels may contain cancer- causing agents. Have you moved any farther away from "may" to anything more definitive?

MICHAEL WALSH: No, not at this point in time, Charlayne. We have been over the last year conducting extensive studies on diesel health effects. We`ve been reviewing the epidemiological data that has been referred to; also looking at the literature as it exists, and conducting some studies of our own. These studies have led us to conclude several things. Number one, diesel vehicles do emit approximately fifty times the amount of particulate matter that comes from current vintage gasoline engines. We know that the particulate matter tends to be of a very small size, approximately 0.3 microns, and the significance of that is that it is respirable. It`s the size of particle that...

HUNTER-GAULT: You mean it can go into your lungs.

WALSH: Goes into your lungs, and goes deeply into your lungs and will stay there for periods of time.

HUNTER-GAULT: Is that bad?

WALSH: It can be bad. It`s certainly bad just on the face of it, by itself, and it may be compounded by another concern that some of the organic material gets attached to the particles, we believe, before it is absorbed into the lungs, and we`re concerned that that may potentially cause a carcinogen problem. We think that the studies to date indicate that we should be concerned, but the studies to date also do not say to us that there is a unique cancer problem with diesels for human beings.

HUNTER-GAULT: In other words, you might have some respiratory problems, but that wouldn`t necessarily add up to lung cancer.

WALSH: That`s correct.

HUNTER-GAULT: When do you expect to have some conclusive findings?

WALSH: Well, I hope that we`ll have conclusive information this time next year, before the automobile industry in general, and General Motors in particular, substantially expands their production of diesel vehicles.

As Mr. Ketcham pointed out, we`re spending an extensive amount of money over the course of the next year to conduct a whole range of studies that we hope will answer these questions for us. I would like to emphasize the same way that Mr. Ketcham did, however, that we are not doing these studies in an effort to go out after the diesel. We just have identified some areas of concern, and we`re doing these health studies to try to find out whether a serious problem does exist, because if it does we`d like to know it before there`s a large investment made in the diesel technology and before we`d have to wreak havoc in some way on an industry that has already committed itself to a very large extent to the diesels.

HUNTER-GAULT: I see; thank you. Robin?

MacNEIL: Dr. Bowditch in Detroit for General Motors, what is your company`s response to these questions that are raised about the possible environmental dangers, and particularly a possible cancer-causing content in the emission?

BOWDITCH: I`d like to make three points. Of course the diesel has been around for some fifty years or so, and there are lots of diesels having been used around the world, in this country in trucks and buses, for instance; and so there have already been quite a number of health studies. We made a survey, before we ever entered into the business of putting diesel engines in automobiles, of going through with our toxicological group at our General Motors Technical Center all of that past medical evidence and there are some forty or fifty references in this study, and each of those studies indicated that there seemed to be no concern about the health effects of diesel exhaust. Now, that`s not to say that we disagree at all with the kind of study that EPA is doing now. We should try and settle all possible health concerns. We have an equal program going -- it may not be quite the size of EPA`s, but it`s a several million dollar project of our own -- in which we`re also trying to be absolutely certain that there won`t be any kind of a health problem. And finally let me assure your audience that the president of General Motors can assure everyone that if indeed there is a health consequence that has any significance at all, General Motors will certainly back out of that diesel business right now.

MacNEIL: Mr. Feaheny, is one of the Ford Motor Company`s motives for not getting into diesels in a big way at the moment that you have some doubts about the environmental effects?

FEAHENY: No, I don`t think we know, and I don`t think there is any hard evidence that there is a problem with diesels. I would generally agree with what Dr. Bowditch has said. Our primary interest is we are concerned about the weight increase that comes with a diesel engine, the tendency for a lack of performance unless you upsize the engine, which leads to yet more weight; and some of the cold-starting problems and other characteristics -- noise. And if the proco engine that we`ve been working on for so long can come home, it can provide diesel economy and avoid those other problems.

MacNEIL: Dr. Bowditch, Automotive News, which Charlayne has already quoted, said in that same edition, Until EPA says yea or nay, there`s no way that the diesel can become a dominant force" as a power plant in this country. Do you agree with that, that you`re really marking time for big production until you know the answer to this?

BOWDITCH: In large measure that`s true. We are trying to schedule our future production around a reasonable time schedule for making certain that this last kind of health study that appears the kind of study that should be going on these days.

MacNEIL: I see.

BOWDITCH: I would like to make one other comment. Mr. Ketcham in his remarks indicted the grave particulate threat that I gather the City of New York, he indicates, apparently has. I would make the point that according to EPA data, if we took all the particulates out of the City of New York and put in all diesel particulate to the same concentration, the mutagenicity and therefore the alleged carcinogenicity would have been reduced by a factor of six, using EPA`s own data. So you see, there is a lot of uncertainty about this diesel problem. We think that most of the problems have already been examined but again certainly want to see these last test run to make absolutely certain.

MacNEIL: What do you say to that, Mr. Ketcham?

KETCHAM: Until I can see the technical evidence it`s impossible to comment.

MacNEIL: I see. Why can`t the pollution of a diesel engine and the particulate matter that`s in that pollution be simply filtered out? Is that not feasible technically, Dr. Bowditch?

BOWDITCH: That`s certainly one of the things we`re looking at in a very active program. Obviously, if we could completely eliminate those particulates, we obviously would much rather do it that way. But again, in order to put this in some reasonable context you should realize that the particulate level from the diesel engine is no greater than it was from the leaded gasoline engines we used to have before the catalysts came along.

MacNEIL: Do you agree with that, Mr. Ketcham?

KETCHAM: That`s true, but they`re a different type of particulates, and in the case of the diesel, from what the evidence suggests, have a greater health risk.

BOWDITCH: That isn`t true at all, though, because tests that have been run with the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Research Group in the City of New York of the New York atmosphere and the buses in that atmosphere back in the mid- 1960s indicated that the gasoline engine particulate was a much larger carcinogenic problem, if indeed there was one, than was the diesel particulate. And that was animal experiments that are even closer to the final human health experiments that of course you`d like to run and can`t.

MacNEIL: I`d like just to ask Mr. Walsh, finally, of the EPA-- you

may have said it and if you did I didn`t hear, and I apologize -- since all this seems to hang on what your guys come up with, when are you likely to have a definitive answer, Mr. Walsh?

WALSH: We`re hoping to have an answer by this time next year, and

I would just like to emphasize one point, that we think the prudent thing for industry to be doing at this point in time while we`re conducting these health studies and while they`re conducting the health studies that Dr. Bowditch referred to, I think it`s important that they also be actively pursuing the control technologies so that if we do find that there is a problem twelve months from now or ten months from now, that...

MacNEIL: That they could do something about it.

WALSH: That they can do something about it.

MacNEIL: I`m afraid we have to leave it there, Mr. Walsh, I`m sorry. In Detroit, thank you very much, Dr. Bowditch and Mr. Feaheny. Thank you, Mr. Walsh in Washington. And thank you, Mr. Ketcham here. Good. night, Charlayne.

HUNTER-GAULT: Good night, Robin.

MacNEIL: That`s all for tonight. We`ll be back tomorrow night. I`m Robert MacNeil. Good night.