What Happens If You Put The Wrong Fuel In Your Car?

Does your car need Petrol or Diesel?What happens if you put the wrong fuel into your car?

The results vary wildly from case to case, but you need to be careful about what kind of fuel you put in your car and be aware of what effects your actions might have. Putting the wrong fuel in your car is a surprisingly common mistake that no one ever wants to admit to,but don’t worry, we have your back.

What Happens When You Put Diesel in a Petrol Car?

Due to the different types of nozzles used for petrol and diesel fuel at stations, its usually kind of difficult to mix them up, but mistakes do happen. If you realized your mistake, the important thing is to stop driving the car. Parking and turning off the engine will limit the damage that will occur. Otherwise, the car will use up the remainder of the petrol in the tank and eventually shut down, since petrol engines can’t combust diesel.

What the mechanic needs to do is to drain the tank and fuel lines, fuel rails and injectors of the diesel fuel. You can’t fix this yourself, but a mechanic will be better suited to handle this kind of work. Usually, there’s no permanent damage, but this kind of fix can be costly together with the cost of a tow to the closet mechanic.

What Happens When You Put Petrol in a Diesel Car?

Going the other way around is far more harmful and dangerous for your car. Diesel is not only a fuel, but serves as a lubricant as well, so you can really damage the fuel-injector pump by using petrol instead of diesel.

That’s not the only thing that can go wrong. Diesel and petrol have different combustion properties, meaning that petrol would detonate much earlier in a diesel engine. As a result, you’ll get misfires and knocking that will require certain parts of the engine to be repaired, rebuilt or replaced,which will be expensive.

If you discovered that you accidentally put diesel into your petrol-powered car, you need to stop running the engine immediately and get a tow to a mechanic, where they will drain and clean your system.

See Related Post: What You Should Do If You Mistakenly Swallow Fuel

How to prevent Misfuelling
While no one’s perfect and it’s impossible to avoid innocent mistakes from time to time, there are a few things we can bear in mind to reduce the risk of falling foul to mishaps at the pumps:

-If you’ve just bought a new car with a different fuel engine to your previous car,leave yourself reminders or prompts in the car to minimise the risk of you queuing for the wrong pump.

-When you pull into a petrol station, cut out distractions and focus. For the sake of the minute or two it takes to refuel, put your phone away and give your undivided attention to the task in hand.

-If you drive a diesel car and are worried about misfuelling, you can buy a device that fits into your filler neck to prevent you inserting the narrower petrol nozzle.

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