Diesel engines are still a source of confusion to some car buyers in the US who are putting petrol in the tank by mistake.
That’s the view of Volkswagen in North America following complaints over stalling engines and clogged fuel pumps.
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Its diesel engined cars have now come under the scrutiny of the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) which said it has received reports of one accident and 160 complaints from owners about engine loss of power and stalling, adding that this was related to high pressure pumps failing and contaminating the fuel system with debris.
About half of the reports involved stalling with “many of these alleging stall incidents at highway speeds in traffic with no restart,” the agency said.
NHTSA is reviewing model years 2009 and 2010 VW Jetta and Golf as well as the Audi A3 which use TDI clean diesel engines, around 97,272 vehicles in total.
The regulator, which received 52 of the complaints directly and the rest through the Wolfsburg, Germany based automaker, upgraded its investigation to an engineering analysis, which can lead to a recall.
A VW spokesman said the company is “cooperating fully” with NHTSA during its investigation. While confirming the investigation, VW in Germany ruled out engineering problems as the cause of the reported faults.
However, Deutsche Press Agency quoted product communications chief Peter Thul as saying the problem arose from filling the tanks of the diesel cars with petrol and denied there had been any problems with the equivalent engines in cars running in Germany.
The Detroit News quoted US VW executives as saying even a small amount of petrol in the diesel fuel could disrupt the lubrication required and cause the high pressure fuel pump to fail.
Thul said: “There is no fault in the engine’s design,” adding that VW suspects US owners had picked the wrong pump at filling stations.
He said that of 50 cars the company had checked, 90% “definitely had considerable amounts of petrol in the tank”.
So-called ‘misfuelling’ is common here in the UK. On its website the Automobile Assicuation said it is estimated that at least 150,000 drivers put the wrong fuel in their car each year – one every three and a half minutes. Ford recently developed a fuel cap and valve system to prevent such mistakes occurring.
