Contaminated Diesel -v- 08 Golf GT Sport TDi

[Greg Roles]

...probably tetra ethyl lead. And the cycle continues...

[IBN]

Lead? I wouldn't think so. I suspect that the extra lubricity might come from a "splash" of biodiesel. The warning in the spec about not allowing copper, zinc or brass in contact with the fuel might be an indication of this. Any chemists out there?
Cheers,
Ivars

[Greg Roles]

I was being smart mate, every time we add something "new" we find out years later how bad it is, such as "ethyl".

[gldgti]

Lead? I wouldn't think so. I suspect that the extra lubricity might come from a "splash" of biodiesel. The warning in the spec about not allowing copper, zinc or brass in contact with the fuel might be an indication of this. Any chemists out there?
Cheers,
Ivars

i think you're right about the bio - many, many pumps have a "This fuel may contain up to 2% Biodiesel" sticker on them these days.

[zydecat]

Just a quick update... Got the car back last night (19 May). Finally!

The bill (which goes to my insurance company) came to just over $8,000. So glad I'm not paying for it!

It ran pretty rough initially, but I think that was more to do with the ECU being reset after being disconnected from the battery (I assume that is the case anyway, the aircon kept trying to blow at max for the first 30 seconds of driving. It settled down eventually too) - the car is driving a whole lot better this morning anyway.

And did the good thing - went straight away to fill up with BP Ultimate as per most of your suggestions... I'll take it for a good drive this weekend and see how it goes.

Funny thing though - after driving a hire car (Hyundai Accent) and then the dealership loaner car (Mitsubishi Lancer), what was the first thing I did as I exited the driveway after picking up the car? Turned on the windscreen wipers! Have to get used to the indicator being on the left again!

So thanks all for your suggestions and advice. Hope we've all learnt something from my experience and I'll update this if anything else goes wrong.

And as Homer Simpson once said "The problem in the world today is communication... Too much communication..." I think there's something in that for all of us.

[VdubDownthePub]

Hey Zydecat,
I'm in Perth, have 07 GT TDI and always use BP or Caltex. Last month just happened to grab 2 consecutive tanks from Shell and have experienced on/off management lights ever since. The car does seem a little harsh, maybe slight performance hit also. I'm currently on my first tank of BP since the incident and the light is more off than on, hopefully to dissapear! I have a service coming up at Golfwagen, hopefully the logs will reveal something......

Cheers - Mark

[gldgti]

Mark,
It was mentioned near the start of the thread about independant servo's maybe being questionable - but your story fits well with my own experiences, that its not really down to whether a servo is mainstream, independant, or services trucks.

All servo's are run differently, and any brand is capable of selling you a bunch of contaminated diesel fuel, so long as the owners of that service station don't care enough.

In my experience, I've had bad diesel from Caltex, Shell and independants, various servo's on numerous occasions. I even once had some pretty average stuff from a BP.

The main thing is to find a good source of fuel and stick to it, and if at all possible steer clear of woolies/coles servo's where they always seem to be profit focussed.

I have a good local independant (Metro) that I buy fuel from pretty much exclusively. You hear all the horror stories about BioDiesel - I've done more than 100,000km on the bio from this servo alone, without even having to do an extra filter change - and it comes through in the service you get and the attitude of the owners of the service station. You can tell that they actually care. Who knew?