When diesel was massively promoted 30 years ago ...
Only a few people still remember this; the politicians have certainly long since forgotten it. But in 1985, diesel vehicles were heavily subsidized in Germany. Not only was the price of diesel at the filling station significantly lower than that of petrol, diesel cars were even exempt from road tax, at least for a short time! This was so interesting that Fiat booked four advertising pages in one issue of "Auto Motor und Sport"!
The fact that diesel cars received tax breaks at all was not originally intended. The actual intention was to promote the introduction of catalytic converter technology and to this end three classes of environmentally friendly cars were introduced, which were to receive tax breaks. In each case, it was a question of petrol engines and whether they had a catalytic converter with a control system, an engine retrofitted with an uncontrolled catalytic converter or a petrol engine retrofitted with exhaust gas recirculation. Depending on the quality class, they then produced 90, 50 or 30 percent less nitrogen oxide than the limits permitted at the time, making them environmentally friendly.
It was soon discovered that this also applied to diesel vehicles and so these were also tax-privileged because they were also environmentally friendly. People didn't have a good feeling about this because of the soot, but at that time the EU was still refusing to define effective limit values for this problem, partly because particulate filters were not yet considered to be fully developed.
As a result, diesel engines also received tax benefits, making the purchase of a diesel passenger car more attractive.
Nevertheless, at the beginning of the 1990s, only around 15 percent of newly registered cars in Germany were equipped with diesel engines. The real boom only came later ...
And this is what the whole fourth page looked like back then:
