In the wake of the 1973 oil embargo, Detroit automakers tried to convince regular, non-truck-driving Americans to switch to diesel. Diesel engines, after all, burn fuel 30 percent more efficiently than gasoline engines. The carmakers failed, in part because of poor engineering: Between 1978 and 1985, General Motors's Oldsmo-bile division produced a series of shoddy, failure-prone engines that gave diesel a bad reputation that persists to this day.
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