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Manchester, VT—I just spent a day in late June driving a trio of SUVs from Mercedes-Benz featuring their new clean-diesel technology called BlueTech. Let me correct that: I spent part of the day driving and the rest of the time scripting, filming and generally screwing up a video that I’ll share with you in the near future.

Pictured: Mercedes-Benz BlueTech. Photos courtesy of Mercedes-Benz

Mercedes-Benz chose Vermont to showcase its new BlueTech diesels in order to highlight that it is the first company to get EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) approval to sell its diesel vehicles in all 50 U.S. states. Vermont, along with California, Massachusetts, New York, Maine and Oregon, has more stringent emissions standards than the rest of the U.S. and, as a result, car companies haven’t been able to sell diesel vehicles in those states. With BlueTech-equipped vehicles, Merdeces-Benz meets and exceeds current and future emissions requirements not only in Vermont but in the rest of the country as well.

Blue what?

‘BlueTech’ is the somewhat awkward name for the technology that Mercedes-Benz uses to make its new diesel engines powerful, efficient, quiet and virtually emissions-free. It consists of a turbo-diesel engine featuring common rail direct injection, a particulate filter and a exhaust treatment technology that pre-treats the exhaust with urea right before it enters the catalytic converter. The last step is the most significant because the urea, or AdBlue in Mercedes-speak, allows the catalytic converter to reduce the nitrous oxide in the exhaust to harmless nitrogen and water vapor. The result is extremely clean exhaust with none of the black soot that used to be equated with diesel engines.

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