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get all car manufacturers to colour the area under the cap and the fuel stations to do the same to the pump nozzles so that when you mate the two it's immediately obvious you've got a mismatch. apparently 150000 people a year in the UK put the wrong fuel in their cars every year and many receive massive bills as a result. It was just a thought I'd share . my excuse was I've been riding motorbikes a lot recently and had got in the habit of using unleaded 😳
Don't some manufacturers make a hole only petrol or only diesel will go in. Frankly, looking for the black pump is easy enough for me though. Must be hard work being colour blind.
wouldn't you think a round hole for petrol and a square one for diesel would be easy enough?
My old 106 didn't like the super unleaded nozels, never tried diesel nozel in it but I assume it wouldnt have fit cos it's bigger than unleaded.. At my local tesco anyway. Philconsequence has made this mistake with his diesel, only realised as he was paying for a full tank of petrol. I think every time now "mine is definitely unleaded"
Coloured caps would be an additional help. Recovery services are a rip off in these circumstances
Always thought people who put the wrong fuel in were muppets.... until I did it myself. Luckily it was only 28p of petrol in a diesel tank, my missus storming out of the car shouting abuse (thank god she noticed) stopped me in my tracks.
So, OP: good idea.
I did it once. Realised pretty quickly and stopped. I called the RAC and they told me to fill it right up with diesel and it probably would'nt do any harm. When I moved to the states I almost did it again as the petrol has a black pump and the diesel is green.
There's nothing that can be done that'll stop it. A mate of mine put diesel in his Ducati motorbike. Twice 
There's nothing that can be done that'll stop it. A mate of mine put diesel in his Ducati motorbike. Twice
Genius! I know someone that's done the same with theirs too (not me I might add).
At least with a motorbike, it's only 15 litres or so of wasted fuel, and its much easier to drain out yourself.
FWIW, unless you've got a brand spanking new, mega high pressure common rail diesel engine, a tiny bit of petrol in the mix won't hurt it really. Back in years gone by, when diesels were less sophisticated, to stop the fuel becoming too thick (this was before lots of additives) in winter, it was recommended to pop a bit of petrol in with your tank of diesel to act as a thinner anyway.
Frankly, looking for the black pump is easy enough for me though.
Diesel pumps are green in the US. Hire cars are petrol 🙄
Just a warning...
Don't you just look at the "diesel" or "unleaded" sign above the pump handle? And all of my cars have a little bit of text in the flap that says what it is.
When the wife was 7 months pregnant (baby brain) she managed to put £20 of petrol in our diesel motor, realised mistake and phoned me crying. Reason she was so upset was not because of the mistake but because the witch in the kiosk gave her a bollocking for blocking the forecourt and told her to push it out of the way 😯
I was once loading a ship with superunleaded (400 tonnes)and when he had been loading for about an hour I asked him why he had not gave me 10 minutes notice for stopping. he explained he was on the normal unleaded parcel.(oh how i laughed)
In all my years as a driver, I've never confused nozzles.
I must be AWESOME, no?
wouldn't you think a round hole for petrol and a square one for diesel would be easy enough?
Any system would have to cater for existing cars otherwise there will be a lot of people who can't fill up their tank.
Are the nozzles not different sizes anyway? As mentioned earlier car manufacturers now make the hole for fuel different sizes so you cant put the wrong fuel in. My car will only let me put a diesel nozzle in anyway.
get all car manufacturers to colour the area under the cap...
Or perhaps take some responsibility for yourself and not expect the car maker to do everything for you. 😛
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it does happen but it is not common by any means I used to have a petrol station doing about 275000 litres a week (Thats a lot 16 pumps 3 staff) and we only had a couple a month do it.
aka_Gilo - I'm sure she soon forgot about it and never mentioned it again . . . not
Colour coding the petrol cap would be great but wouldn't make any difference if you buy an Alfa Romeo. My diesel 159 has a fuel cap with UNLEADED written all over it!
It's only a matter of time before the wife whacks a tank full of petrol in it . . .
Youll be asking them to pump the fuel in for you next 😉
I did it to mine once, but only got £5 worth in and then I realised what a numpty.
Topped it up with diesal and no worries at all, I think if its t'other way round, youre fubar!
Youll be asking them to pump the fuel in for you next
Having spent several years living in countries where people did this for you. I returned to teh UK and took mrsq and I up to scotland on holiday. We were in Mallaig and i needed fuel. Stopped at the petrol station, and waited, nobody came, started to get a bit irrate, when there was a tap at the window, lady asked me if I was lost.
I told her I wanted 50 quid of petrol and opened the boot.
She looked blankly at me and said something about me filling it up. At which point I got quite embarrassed and realised that it was self service in the UK.
We really do need some Burmese refugees over here to operate the pumps to save one getting out of their car
Instead of colour coding it how about they write what fuel it is on the nozzle holder and and then when you pick the nozzle up a little indicator on the screen tells you what fuel you have selected.
Oh...
My diesel 159 has a fuel cap with UNLEADED written all over it!It's only a matter of time before the wife whacks a tank full of petrol in it . . .
I suspect that fuel cap wasn't factory fitted. Why don't you just change the cap, or are you just going to shout at your wife when she puts petrol in it? 😉
.......you wouldn't believe how much it costs the ambulance service every year 😯it does happen but it is not common by any means
I think some people may have missed the point a bit. I've been driving/riding for 35 yrs and never done it before ( fortunately stopped at 36p worth 😀 . I was in autopilot as mentioned ..recently been filling motorbikes so the hand picked up the unleaded . A little writing on the cap is fairly useless if you don't read it which most of us don't however...we do have to make a conscious effort to get the nozzle in the hole ( ooerrr missus) and I think it's at this point if the hole was flourescent orange and the nozzle flourescent orange then the brain would register something was wrong and ring the alarm bells. Colouring the cap itself wouldn't work cos you remove it beforehand. To all the perfect peole who think it's only women /idiots who do it ..maybe your time will come
midlandtrailquestgraham ..I'll do my filler hole if you'll do all the nozzles nationwide!
think I might fit a "fuelsure" now
The ambulance service aren't the only ones
[url= http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/user/nick_panchaud_2 ]Mis-fuelling of motor vehicles[/url]
I've done it! Almost full tank of petrol into a new common rail diesel engine. Drove home ok, started very lumpily the next morning.
I have a new respect for the cars ECU since it recognised something was up and shut the engine off to prevent any damage.
I didn't have anywhere to work on the car, and tbh i'm not sure what i would have done with 50 litres of contaminated petrol so i just called the AA out. expensive mistake!
My excuse is the colour of the pumps was different as the garage had put in a some premium petrol/diesel.
how about a pump that says "this is diesel" or "this is unleaded" repeatedly when you lift the nozzle, until you start pumping.
it would drive you mad ...imagine 10 of them all yapping at once ...be worse than a hen party!
Running a petrol and a diesel at the same time as we do is a increasing the odds of this happening, so I bought one of the "saftey" fuel fillers for the diesel. This means that only the larger diesel nozzle will release the cap. You do have to wear the gloves and then remove the cap from the nozzle before you can fill up which is a bit messy. However for the peice of mind - it was £30 well spent.
[i]"I'll do my filler hole if you'll do all the nozzles nationwide"[/i]
Aren't all filler nozzles colour coded already ?
Genuine question, I run my Land Rover on LPG where it's impossible to make a mistake.
I bought 5 litres of unleaded for the chainsaw recently and just looked for the green marked pump and nozzle.
I'm a bit paranoid about it since I have one petrol car and one diesel.
Also, with my first car I half filled it with diesel for some odd reason despite never having owned or driven a diesel before then. I only noticed because something smelled wrong.
I siphoned it out myself in the car park just down from the garage. The ignominy of having to pay for half a tank of diesel smarted a bit.
Re the nozzle sizes, diesel is bigger than petrol. Which means that a diesel nozzle won't fit in (modern!) petrol cars but petrol will clearly fit in diesel, as above.
Btw in Oregon you're not allowed to fill your own car with fuel at a 'gas station'. It was very weird having someone jump out and serve me as I was getting out of the car - I didn't know it was full service and because I was on out of state plates I suspect he knew I didn't know.
Molgrips there are a few US states that don't let you fill up your car for "safety" reasons. I was at a gas station in New Jersey state last year and the station attendent was smoking whilst filling up. "Safety"!
I'm going LPG next
I have never done this, but I do check about 4 times before I start pumping the fuel that it is the right one.
Almost to the point I worry about having OCD! 😆
MTG ..Its' the actual nozzle/nose/proboscis I want coloured not the handle.
My car doesn't have a filler cap; it's F1 stylee built into the door. However, the engine is a constant and noisy reminder that it should have diesel in it.
My other car takes super unleaded. Lots of it. Never had the urge to put the black stuff in there.
Re the nozzle sizes, diesel is bigger than petrol. Which means that a diesel nozzle won't fit in (modern!) petrol cars but petrol will clearly fit in diesel, as above.
I have a 118d and it wont take a petrol pump. You can place the nozzel in but it just wont take any fuel.
I have a 118d and it wont take a petrol pump. You can place the nozzel in but it just wont take any fuel.
How's that work then? Must be a flap down there that closes or something.
OK, I get you now. I only use petrol or diesel pumps about once every 6 months, so I'm not that familiar with them.
The nozzle its self is just plain aluminium isn't it ? I guess any paint on there would get chipped off and end up in people's fuel tanks where it would block the filter.
They've got a coloured plastic cover, although most of that is taken up by a advertising space.
Crispo, how does that work then ?
I was thinking maybe some sort of electronic key fixed to the car and the pump would be a good idea, with no problems with backwards compatibility like you'd get with odd shaped nozzles. Has someone beat me to it and already fitted it to your car ?
The auto cut-off works on back pressure doens't it? I wonder if the intake could be designed to create more back pressure with petrol than diesel, and hence cut out the petrol pump?
Did it last week, and I mean really did it - £20-odd quids worth in before i noticed. The different sized nozzle thing works to an extent - but its only a one way thing, people are much less likely to put diesel into a petrol than the other way around.
Its the second time I've done it, just been tired and pre-occupied on both occations. The first time the the pump handle was green, but the advert on it was for mars bars, so to look at it was mostly black. The diesel nozzle next to it had a green advert on the handle.
This time round I'd been running around in a hire car the previous week, so had this little mantra in my head still reminding me not to use the diesel.
This would be a be a useful application for Murphy's Law - His real law, not the one that people mis-quote. The story behind that is facinating incidentally and involves Murphy accidently putting a test pilot in a coma, but i digress. His law is "If there are more than one ways of doing something and one of those ways ends in catastophy then design that catastrophy out. In his case it wasn't the fact that he nearly killed someone that was the catastrophy (although it was an accident), his job was to measure the effects of G-Force, and his sensors had been mounted back to front and had recorded no data. So although he'd nearly killed a man, he hadn't found out how much force would nearly kill a man, the test pilot was strained in vain. But Murphy realised that it shouldn't have been possible too fit the sensors back to front in the first place.
Anyway the three pin plug is a application of that law, you physically can't get the plug in the socket the wrong way round, and you shouldn't be able to physically get petrol into a diesel or vice versa, no matter how dumb you are. Most people getting it right most of the time isn't good enough.
My BMW has a black filler cap and when you take it off the underside of it and the inside of the filler pipe is green
The car is diesel
Topped it up with diesal and no worries at all, I think if its t'other way round, youre fubar!
Denzils usually cope with a small amount of petrol no problems, but a large amount will totally trash a modern one. However petrols are more tolerant to the mistake - they may not run (almost definitely wont if its a heavy dose) but flush them out and they'll work fine again without any costly replacements.
To be honest im not really sure how it works, i think i have read that there are two catches on the inside of the filler, because a petrol nozzle is smaller it can't physically push both these catches at the same time, and until these catches are pushed in a flap is left in the way not allowing petrol into the tank.
Comes as standard on all bmws after 2007 afaik.
However petrols are more tolerant to the mistake
Seems a shame then that the current arrangement of small nozzles for petrol and larger for diesel protects the wrong cars
Putting diesel in a petrol car isn't a problem - she'll run, but it won't sound very nice.
Putting petrol in a diesel and you're in trouble...
Seems a shame then that the current arrangement of small nozzles for petrol and larger for diesel protects the wrong cars
I guess it's just historic. Most cars were petrol, then diesels came along and became more popular in passenger cars so they had to produce a different noozle and couldn't make a smaller diameter nozzle??
On a different note, my skipper helpfully put a 10 litre jerrican full of two stroke in my 205 GTi at the end of the racing season a few years ago. I took the risk and topped it up with half a tank of unleaded, and it carried on. The plugs even stayed clean. 😳
Seems a shame then that the current arrangement of small nozzles for petrol and larger for diesel protects the wrong cars
I guess it's just historic. Most cars were petrol, then diesels came along and became more popular in passenger cars so they had to produce a different noozle and couldn't make a smaller diameter nozzle??
The switch to smaller nozzles for Petrol is pretty recent though
They should switch to a combination of nozzle shapes, but that makes them more expensive to make (car and pump) and would need to also be retro-compatible, which would require narrowing of the nozzles I suspect, which in turn would mean reducing flow rate or increasing foaming in the tank as it fills. None of which is good. Ultimately it's not their fault people are a bit forgetful.
Running a petrol engine on diesel can very quickly damage the engine, whereas running a diesel on petrol is far less likely to damage the engine (only time the engine would get damaged, is if the injector tips failed, but chances of that happening are slim). Fuel system failure is a risk on diesels, but the risk is greatly overplayed.
The reason for engine damage is diesel burns at a higher temperature than petrol, which the internals of a petrol engine aren't designed to handle. Typical symptoms are melted/cracked piston crowns, catalyst damage, and cylinder head/valve cracking.
there are two catches on the inside of the filler, because a petrol nozzle is smaller it can't physically push both these catches at the same time
Ford do the same. On the Focus at least, there's a ring that has to be expanded by the pump nozzle in order to yield access to the tank; a nozzle that's too small won't release the opening (and one that's too big won't fit at all, of course). The car comes with a little funnel you can use to override it if you get a non-standard nozzle (ie, you're overseas).