Due out yesterday for another "observed ride" in pursuit of my IAM certification, I pulled in to my local filling station to fuel up my Multistrada. I confess to being a little surprised that it cost over £20, as I normally pay less to refill, but saw that the price-per-litre had risen again, so paid up, kitted up and fired up ... It ran for half-a-second, then stopped. The second time it didn't even fire, then the penny dropped (or possibly the £20 note) - I'd used the diesel nozzle instead of the unleaded! Absolutely no excuse - I have no other diesel vehicles, the handle is black instead of green, and there's only a choice of two! Fortunately, I was near enough to leave bike and helmet etc. at the garage, walk home and return with container and siphon. Once the tank was empty, it took a little churning on the starter to circulate the replacement unleaded before it fired up-smokily at first, then ran normally after a couple of restarts. I was concerned at the effect on the starter clutch when it misfired a couple of times, and when the display showed "Battery Low", but the message to Multi owners is that you can get away with it. It took an extra hour, but most of that was walking home and back. Lesson learnt! I wonder if there's an insert that would reduce the size of the filler aperture so that the larger diesel nozzle won't fit?
Had the same thing happen on my old zx6r years ago... But I used the green. Station had them round the wrong way but refused to admit it. Recovery guy went mental at the manager and said he'd seen it before. Cost me quite a bit to get it all sorted.
There is no adapter that I know of, or have seen for sale. When I got my new bike it had a sticker on it stating it used unleaded!!! so maybe you could use that as a reminder. When I was casually looking at the nozzle sizes of hoses in my local garage when filling up the other day I noticed that they all seemed to be the same size now, the old days seem to have gone when the sizes of nozzles were different for leaded, unleaded and diesel.
I thought new cars had a fail safe system - we were looking at work at a retro fit car solution with Caporo (AP Racing) but it didn't proceed largely due to the OEM's fitting systems, including Ford at the time (around 2005)
My 63 plate Focus has a system that stops me putting unleaded in. But I've not tested it. Was milliseconds from putting diesel in my 996 early this year, fuel cap open, clocks on pump all at 000s, pump over fuel tank and something made me dbl check. Been very paranoid ever since.
Diesel pumps should be seperate from petrol or talking pumps asking are you sure you want diesel In some petrol stations the vpower unleaded and diesel vpower are next to each other !? Why would you do that The only difference is the round bit with vpower is black or red I have double checked a few times
Ford uses a sniffer system which I believe they have patented, this means that other manufacturers are finding it hard to come up with an alternative to get round this problem. I would say that Ducati won't even bother to get involved in this area and if new bikes still specify what fuel to use by putting a sticker on the tank then it seems that they have probably covered themselves. It's interesting to note that certain recovery and breakdown companies will now charge or not cover breakdowns caused by the putting in of the wrong fuel. My insurance company offered me extra insurance against such a mishap but wanted something like £30 extra just to cover one vehicle.
All recovery firms would charge - they have in fact just started to say they won't on a recent advert - forget which one it was though.
When diesel cars first started to get popular, there were a few such things around but I doubt there are now. Most bikers want to be able to peer into their tanks while filling and a narrow neck wouldn't allow that.
having narrower filler nozzles on either diesel or petrol would still mean that it is possible to fit the narrower nozzle into the standard vehicle fill aperture, so is only really good as a one-way avoidance measure (e.g. narrow petrol nozzle and aperture would prevent diesel into petrol vehicles, but would not prevent petrol into diesel vehicles).
What might is having straight for petrol but curved for diesel with a corresponding filler neck on the vehicle. Straight for petrol because very few bikes use diesel.
Discussing how to stop petrol in diesel takes me back, projects I worked on a few years ago as a breakdown provider and the increase im mis-fuels. Massive issues with Bp when they went from green/black to all black pipes. All of a sudden diesels being filled with petrol (the worst of the options). That and because more diesel co cars were being used and often the second car was petrol... It will always be an issue for bikes. Cars (modern) dont really have the diesel in petrol issue any more because of the nozzle size
It's not that much of an issue for bikes. With cars, especially if you hire them, you might not really know if it's diesel or petrol. Can be easy to make a mistake. But there are no diesel bikes so I can't help feeling that putting the wrong fuel in must be quite rare - although numpties are everywhere. Not something I've ever worried about despite some continental pump colours being different. Diesel is normally black but sometimes super unleaded can be black. If in doubt sniff pump.
