As far as the four east coast states, well screw em too if they don't want a diesel powered vehicle!
Seems to me that if really efficient cars were available in mass, with obvious advantages of fuel mileage, longivity, low emissions, the availability of such vehicles in 49 states would make the loss of sales in California unimportant to the manufacturers.
VW, Mercedes and others did just that until the 2005 model year (I think). They built what were called “45 state” diesel engines. None of them did it after 2005; I think some new regulatory kink prevented them from continuing this practice.
I fully agree — the clowns in California should be forced to suffer the ultimate consequences of their own regs. I’d like to see this happen not only with diesel engines, but also with electrical power produced from coal.
Even the really high-mileage diesel cars are a slow sell to the US auto public, because the US auto public is too slow to realize that today’s diesels have NOTHING in common with those festerous GM diesels produced in the late 70s — the converted 350 V-8’s that sucked the chrome off a bumper hitch. The US auto buying public looks back at the VW diesels and GM diesels of that era and remembers:
1. They were slow. Man, were they slow. This was because they often didn’t have turbos.
2. They smoked, because they didn’t have today’s computer control of the fuel rack to prevent over-fueling at low RPM’s and they didn’t have turbos. Today’s diesels really benefit from computer control of the fuel system, wastegate (or variable geometry) on the turbo.
3. Today’s autos and pickups finally have enough gears in the transmissions to start keeping the diesel engine in its optimum power/torque band. This really helps put the acceleration back into these cars.
If I were marketing diesel cars to today’s auto-buying public, I’d just rip the diesel badge off the car/pickup/whatever, put the potential customer into the vehicle without telling the buyer what sort of engine/fuel it is, and take them out for a test drive. While on the test drive, I’d tell them what sort of mileage the vehicle gets. Just keep the word “diesel” out of it until the customer has actually experienced what today’s diesels will do.