By Andy Hum

$3,702 FOR A year’s road tax is no small amount, but that’s how much you will have to pay if you want to drive BMW’s 520d, which is basically a BMW 5 Series with a 2.0-litre diesel engine. Mind you, a year’s road tax for a Porsche 911 Turbo costs less than that.

The authorities here are basically saying that the tax is there to protect the environment and the people living here. But it’s hard to ignore the fact that diesel technology has advanced leaps and bounds over the past couple of years. In fact, about half of Europe’s cars are running on diesel engines. So, something about that technology must be right, right?

Clean as a whistle

To test it out for ourselves, CarBuyer drove the BMW 520d for a while, which BMW Asia had brought in for testing. It has a 2.0-litre turbocharged diesel engine that makes 177bhp and 350Nm of torque – enough to push the car from 0-100km/h in 8.4 seconds and no slouch by any means. And going by its carbon dioxide emissions figures – 162g/km – it’s the second cleanest BMW in Singapore, according to the National Environment Agency’s database.

The cleanest, on the list, is a certain ‘ONE Hatchback’, which we’re pretty sure isn’t actually a BMW. We’ve got a funny suspicion, though, that the ‘ONE Hatchback’ could be made by a brand whose name begins with ‘M’, and that it might be related to BMW, too. And basically that eliminates the mysterious hatchback from the list, making the 520d the cleanest BMW here, in terms of carbon emissions.

Driving a diesel has some disadvantages, though. People stared curiously at our car, because they didn’t know that the engine doesn’t run on petrol and pump attendants will refused to let me near the diesel pumps, because they thought I was mad or didn’t know the difference between petrol and diesel.

But once the door is shut, everything changes. Inside, it’s nearly as quiet as its petrol-powered sibling and none of your passengers will even suspect that they’re in a car that’s fuelled by what was probably once known to some as the devil’s secretions.

At least it wasn’t filled with lousy excuses and has the capabilities to get a move on. Its high torque at low engine revs makes it a brilliant car for both city and highway driving, where its abilities are really hard to ignore.

Fuel for thought

Think a combined fuel consumption rating of 17.9km/L – on paper, that’s what the 520d should get. In contrast, a 1.5-litre Toyota Vios, one of the most popular cars in Singapore, has a combined rating of 12.8km/L. Show those figures to a monkey and even it would be able to tell you that diesel cars will sell like hot-cakes here, if not for the prohibitively priced tax.

Unless you spend much of your time on the road and drive around a lot, owning a diesel car here isn’t a good idea yet. Don’t worry, though, about diesels being dirty because you’re more likely to die of either a heat wave or excessive taxes, courtesy of the happy tree friends who recently met in Copenhagen, Denmark.

While it’s amazing that after years of arguing, blame-pushing and lobbying, they’ve settled on an agreement that isn’t really any agreement at all, what’s more noteworthy, though, is how far diesels and its technology has come, and how economical and clean they can be now. And if Singapore is to meet its supposed emissions growth reduction target of seven to 11 percent, providing real incentives to drive cleaner cars will be a good way to start.