New and fragile diesel engines

At the moment I'm driving Skoda, which is part of Volkswagen concern. Essentially it's a designed around common frame and engine designed by VW, but is "eastern" design and somewhat cheaper to buy. I drive about 20000km a year, which means that so far diesel (with average consumption about 5l/100km with this car, sometimes reaching as low as 4l/100km with longer travels at relaxed pace) has been a quite natural choice. And I happen to like the low-end torque diesels offer, gasoline engines just need to be revved lot higher for equivalent power.

It used to be that traditional fully mechanical diesel engines could go for half a million kilometres or so without major hassles. Unfortunately new diesel engines seem to be more fragile than the old ones - especially the emissions control parts.

Just a few days ago the car suddenly popped up "Engine fault - workshop" message and dropped into limp mode - it lost a lot of power, resulting me barely being able to drive uphill. The reason was EGR valve - emission control device that, based on what I've read is the most fragile part of this specific engine type. And it isn't cheap either, replacement cost me about 1100eur (!!!), half of which was the part itself. I was pretty far away from home at the moment so I didn't really have any options to look for cheaper alternatives.

Now, as bad is the situation was, I got a replacement car for the duration of repairs for essentially free. The replacement was equipped with a bit newer gasoline engine, which for my absolute surprise had used just 16,5 litres of gasoline after 340km (that is amount I pumped in it before returning it). That's about 4,85l/100km, or about 48.5mpg (US). Pretty damn impressive for gasoline engine, as I expected consumption closer to 7l/100km or so at best (this was mostly highway driving at 80-100km/h, slower city driving might have different results)

With that low consumption I really have to think about what kind of engine my next car will have. As much as I like (and am used to) the low-end torque diesels offer, this kind of figures make gasoline engines quite tempting again, especially with tax structure of cars and fuels around here.