The misfuelling farrago
By Tom Stewart
The AA estimates that at least 150,000 UK drivers put the wrong fuel in their car each year. That’s one every three and a half minutes, and the problem is on the rise. The RAC agrees and itself deals daily with around 115 misfuelling call-outs.
Last summer, and for the first time ever, I became one of the 150,000. Being an AA member it cost me £194 inc. VAT for the call-out (it’s now over £300 for non-members), plus £50 in wasted unleaded and two hours by the roadside.
Rotten luck you may say, but it could have been worse.
Some friends of mine with a diesel Range Rover did the same and were told by their Land Rover agent that their warranty would be invalidated unless they had a new engine fitted – at £7,000 all in. I also know of another family that having also misfuelled, coughed up £6,000 for a replacement engine for their E-Class estate.
The AA’s website offers sound advice for those who have misfuelled and goes into some technical detail concerning the potential damage caused by misfuelling both diesel and petrol engines, so it’s obviously not something to be recommended. Furthermore, an RAC TV ad a while ago suggested that one misfuel could cost you around £3,000 to fix, while an article in the Daily Telegraph’s Motoring section warned that “merely clicking ‘unlock’ on your diesel car’s key fob could destroy its engine if you have filled the tank with the wrong fuel”.
However, the long-serving AA Fuel Assist technician who came to my rescue told me that he’s yet to see or hear of any evidence to suggest that the wrong fuel in either petrol or diesel engines does any lasting harm at all, even if driven on the wrong fuel for miles. The only problem, he says, is getting petrol engines restarted as derv can foul spark plugs – which these days are often hard to access – and it can cause temporary problems in petrol injector pipes.
Furthermore, he said that petrol in diesel – far and away the more common error of the two – can actually be beneficial because, despite some heavy but temporary pinking upon restart, the petrol flushes out the whole system, as evidenced by dense clouds of smoke and a square meter of black soot on the ground beneath my own car’s tailpipe when it restarted. (Having had no new parts or repair work, my 90,000-mile 1.9 turbodiesel is still running fine nine months later, and this wasn’t the first time it had been misfuelled, both times having been started up and driven as far as it would go on unleaded.)
There is now Ford’s Easy Fuel system and something similar from Land Rover, plus a few Dragons’ Den-type aftermarket inventions to prevent misfuelling, eg. the Diesel Key and the Fuel Angel, but the industry as a whole seems largely uninterested in properly addressing the problem at its root cause.
My AA Fuel Assist man averages seven call-outs per day, which equates to around £6,000 – £7,000 (excl. VAT) income for the AA per 5-day week, per technician. And, he says, “Sooner or later everyone does it, even black cab drivers”. The AA claims to handle 60,000 wrong fuel call-outs per year, or getting on for £10 million’s worth (excl. VAT), while garages often charge £300+ for a simple fuel drain. Additionally, fuel stations sell an ‘extra’ 7.5 million litres of ‘correct’ fuel per year. (Okay, so that’s a drop in the ocean relative to total sales, but it’s still three olympic swimming pools worth.)
In short, I estimate that this is a £30-40 million per annum industry, excluding any warranty/engine replacements as mentioned above. According to that Telegraph article, “The annual cost of repairs is estimated at more than £800 million”, and in practice most of those expensive and largely unnecessary repairs won’t have been covered by insurance.
The AA says that the wasted fuel it gathers "is recycled through a waste management company with the end product being used to power cement kilns and furnaces…". So there’s more income…. Also, my AA man told me that although the technology exists to separate and re-use the mixed fuel gathered, this wasn’t yet being done, at least not from his depot. And if this is beginning to sound like an attack on the AA it’s not meant to – the AA provides a very useful, if costly service. It’s the manufacturers and fuel companies who, admittedly at some expense to themselves, could together do more to ease the situation.
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