I have the fortune and opportunity to have experience in a variety of areas of the automotive enthusiast scene. As I alluded to in one of my previous blogs, my "day job" is overseeing nine truck enthusiast sites, one of which is a diesel-only enthusiast site.

There's absolutely no doubt that there is a significant and growing population of diesel truck enthusiasts out there. Whether you look at it empirically or anecdotally, the diesel truck crowd is growing by the day.     

But I wonder if the enthusiasm for diesels will translate from trucks to passenger cars in the U.S.? There's an active diesel tuning scene in Europe, and there has been for the better part of a decade.

Take Honda for instance...Some of the engines have factory redlines of 8,000 or even 9,000 rpm! How willing will those drivers be to give up high-rev thrills for a loping 4,500 rpm redline, but more than 300 lb./ft. of torque?  

Granted, driving a car at high revs on the track makes you think you're an F1 Driver, but with proper gearing and driving techniques, a diesel can be a very competitive performance car, as amply demonstrated by the Audi R10's LeMans victory.

It's just a very different feeling between going fast in a diesel and going fast in a tuned gasoline-powered car. Diesels seemingly devour the road with their engines revving lazily at between 3,500 and 4,500 RPM at wide-open throttle, pushed along by a tsunami of torque, whereas high-performance gasoline cars rely on high-RPM horsepower to deliver the goods. Is one method better than the other? I guess it's as subjective as whether you prefer chipotle or habanero salsa, or spicy tuna rolls or eel sushi.

But the prospect that you could get this level of performance with an average fuel consumption of around 40 miles per gallon -- or higher, in some cases -- is a pretty compelling case. I know I'll be one of the first to start snooping around these new clean diesels when they finally come rattling off the container ships in a year or so.