Diesel engines easily run 400.000km especially Mercedes cars but petrol will give up way sooner
In: Engineering
The fundamental difference in the engines is that petrol/gas compresses a mix of fuel and air. This has far reaching implications and makes gas engines about 4x as delicate because they’re complex. Diesel engines are very simple and don’t need any predictions to run well.
Diesel engines inject the fuel at the last second once the air is already compressed. Diesel engines do not use spark plugs, so there is no potential issue with timing, supply, quality, etc of a 2nd thing. Gas engines must control spark, fuel, and air flow in a tight range. This is complex and the measurements and adjustments are all made based on readings from past events (for example Oxygen sensors read the average of the last several combustion cycles over a few seconds) and predictions are based on those. There is a lot of uncertainty once you account for the cumulative effects of all these measurements and predictions.
Diesel engines on the other hand control fuel injection rate. That’s about it. Air is unrestricted and spark is nonexistent. There is no real need for prediction of much of anything. Devices like EGR are used on both technologies and help deal with things like high combustion chamber temperatures based on exhaust temperatures, but that isn’t strictly required for diesels to run.
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