Motors my new car does 1 mpg!

Serious filled her up at tesco aberdeen - and 13 miles later she's empty

Daughter put £35 of unleaded in just over half tank ) took RAC 4.5 hours to get us sorted - so not in best of moods. Probably gonna cost me >£200 all in. I wonder why unleaded noxxles aerent made so don't fit diesel cars? of 3 people i know who have done this all are women - probably coincidence but?

 

good thing it wasn't the other way around - putting diesel in a petrol car pretty much kills it. a diesel can sort of burn petrol, ish, but you wouldn't wanna fill the thing.

 

What car do u drive?

 

Unlucky. I guess this sort of thing is why whenever I'm in a petrol station my OCD kicks up a notch.

 

doh!

 

c4 picasso 1.6

 

Have you ever considered beating her? putting a label on the filler flap?

 

On the inside... Not the outside - fastest way to make you look stupid!

 

Not that uncommon. We used to have it happen all the time at a place i used to work with the forklifts. They wern't marked and people would forget which was which.

What pisses me off is that the high flow diesel nozzles don't fit in the filler holes on our ambulances. Sucks to pull up to a pump, go through all the card BS, and then have to move to another pump and repeat because this one is the large bore nozzle.

 

diesel engines are amazing machines

 

My mum put unleaded in her first diesel car a few months after getting it. Luckily she realised what she had done before she turned the engine over so didn't damage anything too expensive.

 

Not to be a musclehead or anything, but do your precious diesel motors give the same driving excitement as, say, a Civic Type R of loosely similar efficiency? (honest question, folks)

 

I wouldn't want to own a diesel with less than 6 cylinders.

 

I don't think you can physically put diesel into a petrol tank - the diesel nozzles are too fat.

Apparently older cars are much more tolerant of the wrong fuel. There was a test on 5th gear a few years back where they filled up both an old petrol and an old diesel astra (m reg ish IIRC) with the wrong fuel, and drove them until they stopped. With draining and a tank full of the correct fuel, both cars were running fine again in 3-4 miles - no expensive bleeding required.

I'm a bit annoyed to find that my car only does ~30mpg as guessed by me. It's a polo, surely it should do more

 

er.... have you drove a 3L lupo? it is scary fast and scary fun...... and does 78mpg.... shame it is so difficult to get hold of one around here....

 

Remember a bunch of us doing something like this before, couple guys shared sucking out the fuel, was funny.

 

my dad's mercedes 6-cylinder, 3.2 litre, behemoth does, for sure.

my a3 2-litre turbo a3 is shockingly fast. sure there's a bit of turbo lag and you have to change your driving style, but as long as you keep the turbo ticking over it's brill - the important thing you have to remember with diesels is that even though their peak power output is not as high as a petrol engine, it's much more smoothly delivered, readily available at lower revs, and the torque is much higher, leaving you with pretty comparable acceleration on a well tuned car. the greatest thing about turbodiesels is the amount of headroom they have for chipping - without even trying very hard you can take a 150bhp engine to 200.

 

Likewise with the Fabia vRS I'm soon to be getting, I took it out for an hour and half test drive the other day, and whilst there is a little lag, it wasn't hugely different, the engine in my rav4 seems to have lag (it's a non turbo petrol) because its power band is quite high up the rev range.

You don't need 6 cylinders in a diesel to put a huge smile on your face, far from it. I would say you'd need a 6 cylinder petrol to deliver the same wallop of acceleration you get from a 4-pot turbo diesel, anyone disagree?

 

With the new generations of variable vane turbos and the torque you get from a diesel, they're easily as fun as petrols. There's a reason Audi have shoehorned a V12 TDI in to an R8

 

Don't forget the noise a turbo makes - awesomness in a bottle.