It becomes increasingly clear that internal combustion engines are simply not capable of having the kind of low emissions that a continued use of them would require, no matter what corporate propaganda would like to spread about them.
I think there are still some relatively niche use-cases for them left. Specifically, if you're using sufficiently few of them and/or using them in sufficiently rural areas, then all of the polluting outputs other than greenhouse gases become less of an issue, and if you're running them on 100% biofuels, then they can be carbon-neutral. (Also, since vegetable oil doesn't contain sulfur to begin with, an engine running on biodiesel emits zero SOx, which is nice.)
In other words, replacing the cars and trucks that can reasonably be replaced with bicycles, trains, and electric automobiles (ranked from best idea to worst, by the way) is good enough; we don't have to be perfectionist about it.
I have honestly never seen someone who brags about a Cummins who isn't a douchebag. I have several truck friends, all of them agree Cummins is reserved for redneck douchebags.
Mercedes, VW and pretty much the rest of them cheated the sniffers by putting it in a clean mode when it was on the rolling road (probably by testing suspension travel and steering angles in the traction control software/hardware). They caught VW first with a mobile sniffer test under normal driving. Since then they found Volvo, Renault, Jeep and a bunch of others are doing similar bullshit.
Clean mode probably cut the power output in half and would have made them drive like the non-turbo diesels of yore.
Disclaimer: I’m actually a car enthusiast/nerd, but I’d like to see cars become the opposite of how bikes are used in my area. Weekend hobbies that are used for enjoyment or maybe to go traveling out of the reach of infrastructure. Not to slog to an office everyday in 4000lbs of hydrocarbon powered metal.
