All the popular car talk among the "in" crowds in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco has been about electric cars for at last the last 4-5 years. And yet, despite massive subsidies of various kinds, including non-monetary incentives and mandates, combined pure battery-electric vehicle (BEV) sales and plug-in hybrid (PHEV) sales in 2017 barely exceeded 1% of the U.S. 17 million unit U.S. Monthly Plug-In Sales Scorecard.

Meanwhile, when it comes to fuel source alternatives to gasoline, we are about to see U.S. 2018 and 2019 that may dwarf all the electric car efforts to date by a wide margin. And I'm not talking about hydrogen fuel cells. I'm talking about diesel. Didn't diesel just die in September 2015 and in the two years that followed, Isn't that what we heard at Washington, D.C., cocktail parties and from news reports out of Europe,

It turns out that in the real world, outside Europe, outside Washington, D.C., and outside California's quest to force people to buy electric cars, the reality is quite different. It doesn't get a lot of media attention, because it doesn't fit the politically correct narrative, and the beneficiaries aren't all of these new and sexy startup automakers. Let's start by reviewing why 2015 and 2016 were bad years for diesel in the U.S. The largest provider by far - Volkswagen (OTCPK:VLKAY), which includes brands such as Audi and Porsche - stopped selling diesel in the U.S.

2015. Mercedes followed around the end of 2016. BMW reduced the scope of its diesel offerings, although it did not end them, as it has a couple of models left (3-series plus 3-series station wagon). FCA stopped selling the Jeep Grand Cherokee diesel and only returned with the RAM 1500 diesel near the end of 2017 after a one-year hiatus.

For all of those reasons, diesel in the U.S. However, with the retreat among some players - Volkswagen Group and Mercedes most prominently - what replaces these diesel purveyors is far more significant. Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) entered the U.S. October 2015, just as Volkswagen Group departed. JLR started with two models and has kept adding diesel choices through August 2017. As a result, it now has seven diesel models in the U.S.

As you can see in the table above, once we have removed the various JLR models from the equation that aren't offered as a diesel, the overall JLR U.S. 13.7% in 2017 - materially higher than the 9.7% headline number counting all the JLR vehicles that you can't buy in a diesel version. Nissan entered the U.S.

Titan HD pickup truck two years ago. As of one year ago (February 2017), Nissan informed that its diesel take rate on the Titan HD was exceeding 30%. However, Nissan does not break out its HD version of the overall Titan sales. I have assumed it's approximately one third. Ford starts deliveries of its F-150 diesel near the end of the current quarter - March 2018. As with GM's pickup trucks, it should be obvious that this has the potential for being a large volume vehicle.

Likewise, as with GM, one can reasonably expect that Ford will offer this diesel engine in its large body-on-frame SUVs as well, perhaps as early as this fall. Those would be the Ford Expedition and Lincoln Navigator. Most recently, Ford announced that its Transit Connect minivan will be available this fall in a diesel version.

This will be Ford's first front-wheel-drive diesel vehicle in the U.S. On January 13, 2018, GM announced that it will offer a diesel version of the Silverado full-size pickup truck, which enters the market in the fall. This most certainly also means that the GMC Sierra sister vehicle, to be announced later this week, will get the same diesel engine.



It also means that, most likely, one year later - second half of 2019 - when GM launches a new generation of full-size body-on-frame SUVs - Tahoe, Suburban, Yukon, and Escalade - they too will get the same diesel engine. Mazda announced in November 2016 that it would be bringing a diesel to the U.S. 2017, in the form of the CX-5 compact SUV. Well, this got delayed, and it's not yet available.