Whilst visiting my local Sainsbury’s petrol station last week to refuel my guzzling Vito with yet another £80 worth of Diesel, I couldn’t help but notice the AA van opposite. It was connected to a 2006 Audi A3 by a series of pipes and a big warning sign informed passers-by that they shouldn’t smoke, use naked flames or mobile telephones. A quick glance in the back of the van revealed an array of shiny dials and gauges and it was very reminiscent of an aircraft refuelling truck used to refule jets at Heathrow!

Of course, I knew exactly what it was for as we see the results of what’s commonly known as ‘mis-fuelling’ practically every week. According to the AA, some 150,000 people a year accidently put the wrong fuel in their cars, which is 1 every 3.5 minutes! I didn’t even need to look at the back of the car to know that it was a Diesel, or that the owner had filled it with unleaded petrol. Thanks to the fact that the fatter Diesel pump nozzle won’t fit through the restricted aperture of a car designed for unleaded, the reverse mis-fuelling is pretty rare.  A moment’s lack of concentration however can easily result in the narrow petrol pump nozzle being inserted into the wider Diesel filler hole and a quick squeeze of the trigger is enough to ruin your day!

The start of a bad day!

You see, modern Diesel engines object most strongly to being forced to sip the far more volatile and significantly thinner petrol.  The results of driving away in a Diesel car filled with petrol can be catastrophic for your car’s engine, and equally importantly, for your wallet (or purse). The AA offer their excellent ‘Fuel Assist’ service (as above) to come and suck the offending juice from your tank, clean the fuel pipes and put some fresh Diesel fuel in to get you running again, before any damage has happened. The most important thing to do once you’ve realised that you’ve put petrol in a Diesel car is to NOT START THE ENGINE.  Even if you fill the tank to the brim with petrol, as long as you don’t attempt to start the engine, the wrong fuel won’t reach the engine’s vital components and no damage will be done. By then sucking all of the petrol out of the tank and filling it back up with Diesel, you’ll be 99% certain to have done no damage.  Apart from the embarrassment (and possible spousal argument), wasted tank of petrol and the £160 or so cost of the recovery action, your pride and joy will live to drive another day.

Of course, sometimes it can cost an absolute fortune to repair, and this is generally when you don’t use a fuel recovery specialist and simply call your vehicle manufacturers nearest main dealer instead. Here’s where things can take a somewhat more unpleasant and costly turn for the worse!

If you’re fortunate enough to drive a fairly new BMW or Mini Diesel and inadvertently fill it with petrol, please don’t be tempted to call your local BMW dealer and ask them for assistance. They all seem to operate the same policy regarding misfuelling and that is to have it recovered to the dealer where they’ll replace every single component in the fuel system at a cost of between £4000 and £9000. I know this from experience as we’ve collected several vehicles from a local BMW dealer’s workshop on behalf of customers that wanted a second opinion when faced with a bill large enough to cause financial meltdown and/or credit card maxxing.  Despite the disapproving  ’tutting’ of the dealer service adviser when we collect the cars, and the stern warning that the engine will never be the same again unless every single component is replaced ‘as a precaution’, every car we’ve drained and refilled has been fine since. Sure, we drain the entire tank and blow through the fuel lines and yes, we replace the contaminated Diesel filter but it’s never cost any of our customers more than £200.

Compare the situation to accidently pouring bleach into a drinking glass insted of diet Coke and then realising just before you put it to your lips. Do you throw the glass away? Of course not – you just give it a throrough rinse a a few times and then it’s fine to drink from. Likewise, just because a car’s fuel tank has been filled with petrol, you don’t need to throw it away and have a new one fitted for £800. You just fill it with Diesel again after it’s empty and it’s as good as new. For reasons unknown (well, I suspect the average cost  of £6000 a go, generally paid for by an insurance company helps) it’s BMW ‘company policy’ to replace the fuel tank, fuel pipes, fuel lift  pump, pressure regulator and main injection pump as a matter of routine, whenever a misfuel has occurred. I’m pretty sure that it’s a fairly ‘good earner’ for cash-strapped main dealers to provide a lucrative and regular income stream to help finance their plush showrooms at the expense and misery of their customers. After all, with one misfuel every 3.5 minutes, I’ll bet they’ll get a few every week. I haven’t looked yet, but I’ll wager that the skip at the back of the BMW dealer workshop is simply brimming with ‘contaminated’ fuel system components awaiting disposal.  As the insurance companies cough-up £6000 for each job, that’s a tidy profit and keeps the technicians busy during any lull in their £130 an hour labour rates.

Anyway, enough of my moaning – we’re quite happy if you want to have your misfuelled car recovered to us as we can drain the tank, change the filter, clean the pipes and even add £20 of fresh Diesel all for under £200. With the £5800 you save, you could put down a sizeable deposit on a new BMW! The question is, would I ever admit to misfuelingl a vehicle? I’m afraid the reluctant answer is yes, and twice!

 I once filled a petrol (pre-unleaded) 1988 Peugeot 405 with Diesel and only got about 500 yards before the plumes of dense smoke behind me and the spluttering engine gave the game away! Not owning a garage (or having staff) at the time, I had to painstakingly siphon all of the Diesel out into cans before adding some clean petrol. It still smoked for a few days afterwards, but was fine after that, although due to my poor siphoning technique, I managed to enjoy the less-than-delicious taste of a Diesel/petrol cocktail.

My other misfuel was a little more unusual. In my previous career as an aircraft technician (on nightshift), I had to take our gang’s Transit (a 1986 2.0Petrol Automatic – C166 WLH where are you now?) over to the cargo area for a refuel. As this was in the pre-unleaded days, the filler nozzle was massive and would accept most things. In the pitch black of a 3am nightshift in winter, I pulled-up at the fuelling bowser (a large tank with a hand pump) and proceeded to fill. I didn’t think at the time that the huge aluminium nozzle looked particularly strange, or that the fuel I labouriously pumped into the van smelled ‘a bit funny’ so carried on regardless. I’d just got over the roundabout at Hatton Cross when the van started ‘pinking’ and losing power. As soon as I passed the security point, it conked-out completely. I spent the next few hourslying on the ground in freezing temperatures draining the tank of this fuel that seemed to be neither petrol or Diesel. Whilst explaining this predicament to my supervisor, I discovered that the pump I’d used actually contained Jet A-1 Avaition fuel, as used to power  a Boeing 747 rather than a 2.0 Transit! It was actually  intended  to fill the tank for the small gas turbine engine on the back of an  ’Airstart’ lorry used to provide compressed air for air conditioning and for starting the big Jet engines if the auxillary power unit in the tail was knackered!  Needless to say, I never made this mistake again and was very careful to carry a bright torch for my next refuelling trip to identify the pump correctly.

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