Why Do Diesel Vehicles Warm Up Slowly?

I don't want to drag this out and bore you. I'll present it as a quick summary without going too deep into the engineering.

Diesel engines are theoretically more efficient than gasoline engines because they have a higher compression ratio. This means a larger portion of the energy the engine produces is converted into motion, and less waste heat is generated. For this reason, diesel engines, which have a denser block alloy, warm up slowly because they generate less heat. The best example of this is the PD-series 1.9 TDI diesel engines.

We can think of it briefly like this (the figures are hypothetical): let's assume that in a gasoline car, 4 out of 10 liters of fuel goes into motion. The remaining 6 liters of gasoline is released as waste heat. In a diesel engine, on the other hand, 5 liters go into motion while 5 liters are released as waste heat. In other words, it produces 1 liter less heat than the gasoline engine. We can describe the engineering behind it this simply.

In short, in winter, raising the cabin temperature in a car with a diesel engine is quite a bit harder than with a gasoline car. If the car has a 1.9 TDI engine, it can really be a problem 😅