My sister put gasoline in her diesel car and now she might have to get a new car. I don’t even have a driver’s license and have a rudimentary understanding of how simple combustion engines work. Why is the car maybe dead, can it be fixed?
In: Engineering
Gasoline has a much lower octane number than diesel fuel, which indicates how much the air-fuel mixture can be compressed before the fuel ignites uncontrollably. Diesel engines run with very high compression ratios, meaning that if you put gasoline in a diesel engine you’re going to get a lot of uncontrolled pre-ignition (fuel igniting before it’s supposed to). That creates a lot of heat and random combustions, which can destroy an engine.
By comparison, putting diesel fuel in a gasoline engine is not nearly as problematic. In all likelihood, the engine will just not run very well or not run at all. So, if you accidentally put diesel fuel in a gasoline car, just drain the tank and flush out the fueling system and you should be fine.
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