21/11/2008 10:18. of the LA Auto Show yesterday, Wolfganag Hatz, the head of Audi/VW's powertrain development sat with us for a few minutes to talk about the future of diesels in the United States. He also hinted at the future diesel products coming from Audi.

Diesel cars were once written off as smoky, underpowered slugs, but that's rapidly changing as we found recently on a comparison test drive of the new Jetta TDI . Mercedes and VW sell wonderful diesel-powered cars. Audi will follow soon with the Q7 diesel and so will BMW with a 335d diesel 3 Series that we drove in Europe . All of these cars meet the same emission requirements as their gas-powered brethren.

Meeting them, however, requires extraordinary methods. In particular, diesel combustion produces high levels of NOx that are impossible to... // Popular Mechanics