Thread: Oops, wrong fuel in cars

That's the greatest sin a tanker driver can commit. It's called mixing a shandy.

Originally Posted by V8Ian;[URL="tel:3199723"

3199723[/URL]]That's the greatest sin a tanker driver can commit. It's called mixing a shandy.

Didn’t know Fourex came in tankers.

Just thinking about it, aside from the fact it won't burn in a spark ignition engine I can't see how diesel would cause much damage to a petrol engine. Certainly some cost in removal or flushing, but I'd be interested to know of any damage to the fuel system.

Would certainly cause some gumming up of filter, pumps and injectors. Whether this would be recoverable by flushing is an interesting question. I would probably be chasing replacement parts.

be a very different prospect the other way around I imagine.

I also suspect that a few fault codes might be thrown 😂

Originally Posted by BradC

Just thinking about it, aside from the fact it won't burn in a spark ignition engine I can't see how diesel would cause much damage to a petrol engine. Certainly some cost in removal or flushing, but I'd be interested to know of any damage to the fuel system.

Few years ago, we had two of our company petrol vehicles engines damaged by being filled up with diesel. The 1st was a Toyoace trayback, the guy who filled it must have been thinking about something else at the time, the tank had written in 50mm high red paint above filler neck "PETROL ONLY". the second was a Toyota Landcruiser Ute, the guy who filled it said, "BUT ALL LANDCRUISERS ARE DIESEL", in both cases the vehicles sustained broken compression rings caused by them being quite a few k's with engine knocking & by the time they returned to the workshop they had a smoke screen following. Booth vehicles had a few k's on them at the time which probably didn't help the damage.

I'm quite surprised diesel mixed into petrol would do harm. I thought the car would just run like crap (or not run). However petrol into diesel ....... Big problems!

seeya
shane L.

A lot depends on the percentage of wrong fuel and how technologically advanced the engines are.
Old mechanical diesels and low compression, carburated petrols are quite tolerant of contamination.
Commonrail and very high pressure diesels are extremely susceptible to catastrophic damage, from lack of lubrication in petrol. I'd imagine in modern petrol engines, trying to run on diesel, the knock sensors and computers would be having coniptions.
In days of yore, some agricultural machines once started, were switched to run on kerosene. Early Holden grey motors would run reasonably on kero. Oh for the days when kero was significantly cheaper than standard petrol, rather than three times the price of 98!
Kero and diesel are very similar, but while diesel is a lubricant, kerosene is abrasive.