It was suggested by Perth Business Gateway to rewrite the 2001 proposal to use the Millennium Dome as a global environmental management centre, this time relevant for Scotland in 2006. The outline executive summary, Scotland:The World's First Ecological Superpower, was produced. The next stage is to implement it, what do you think?

Thursday 1 March 2007

Contaminated Petrol, Mass Hysteria or Trying It On

The lunch time news has been contaminated fuel, contaminated fuel etc etc. Is it or just mass hysteria? There are 10's millions cars on the road, so how many break down each day. The reports are saying hundreds or thousands of cars affected. One petrol station will serve hundreds of cars if not 1000s for a large one. So the figures don't seem to make sense.



The news seem to be reporting any old rubbish. ITV did a 5 minute interview with a Porsche owner who had broken down, the last question was, what was wrong? He replied the air mass meter. Dong. This is on the air inlet side, nothing to do with fuel or the exhaust and has nothing at all to do with the fuel side of the engine management system.



The BBC took one report from someone in Belfast who went to a nature reserve, crashed into a rock and his brakes seized, he put this down to the oxygen sensor. No you drove into a rock.



At the moment nothing from the media is giving me any indication that the breakdowns are anything more than the statistical average number that have then been whipped up into some mass delusion by the media.



One thing it has exposed is the complete inaccuracy of news reporting, absolutely no checks or any attempt to check the accuracy or validity of reports. If the media are doing it with something as simple as engine management systems of cars, what other bullshit are they passing off as truth. Apart from most of what they say on the environment that is.



Got to go the spare tyre needs repairing and I did buy some diesel last week, there must be a connection. I'll do the interview for Panorama or Dispatches first then contact trading standards to see what my rights are to getting 4 new ones in compensation.



Going to be really interesting to see how this one turns out. One thing is for certain there are going to be loads of people caught out for trying it on. Every scrap and knacked car in the south east is probably now being pushed into the road in an attempt to get some compensation.

6 comments:

Running Post said...

Hello Roger,Check out the paint job on the new Honda F1 by visiting my site.Say what you feel mate!;don't hold back!ha ha.....Shaun.

Running Post said...

Hello Roger,well that's a bit of a coincidence;i've just been to your site to get your word on the new Honda paint job.
Yes,well, to be honest, i'm not that interested in Jade Goody myself, but these showbiz stories can 'sometimes' bring in a lot of welcome traffic to the site;it depends.

The fuel thing is very interesting,but there's not a lot for me to add.I think someone will have a lot of explaining to do when this a all comes to the surface.

I've published your comment anyway with a reply,hope you dont mind the association with my showbiz trivia?.

Running Post said...

Hello Roger,well that's a bit of a coincidence;i've just been to your site to get your word on the new Honda paint job.
Yes,well, to be honest, i'm not that interested in Jade Goody myself, but these showbiz stories can 'sometimes' bring in a lot of welcome traffic to the site;it depends.

The fuel thing is very interesting,but there's not a lot for me to add.I think someone will have a lot of explaining to do when this a all comes to the surface.

I have published your comment anyway with a reply.Hope you don't mind being on a showbiz trivia post mate?.

Running Post said...

Looks like they have traced the contaminated fuel to a distributor in Essex(maybe it specifically enhances the Essex boy racers souped up cars,ha ha!). But i do agree with you when you say,non contaminated fuel related problems are going to be taken advantage of by a few cheeky or confused motorists.

brian in the tamar valley said...

Roger I certainly agree with you about the very poor media reporting on this story and on their selection of incidents which they have highlighted. It is my constant concern that they only look for headlines and with few exceptions do not do the serious in depth investigation that is required.

It seems now that silicon may be the rogue element that has caused the problems but I don't believe that there is cast iron proof on this. You rightly point out the huge number of motorists filling up with petrol that haven't been affected. So how can that be? Luckily for me my 25 year old car doesn't have an oxygen sensor let alone an engine management system nor have I recently bought petrol in the south east! Having said that a map I saw on the BBC suggested that there had been problems not only in the south east but in deepest Cornwall amongst other places. Rather a long way from the Essex terminal methinks.

Assuming fuel contamination is definitely proved then Tesco, Morrisons and any others should be forced to pay up for repairs on principle no doubt about that. The difficulty lies in the proof of course as you and Shaun have alluded to. What a messy old problem this has proved to be! Glad I'm not affected I must say.

Roger Thomas said...

I can understand it better if it is something like silicon which could leave a deposit on the lambda sensor. Originally the media were going for a witch hunt against ethanol blaming a sudden change to green fuels. Most cars can run on ethanol (many in Brazil do) with a simple conversion, so I couldn't see it as that. We had a huge switch from eaded to unleaded years ago and that didn't cause much of a problem.

I suppose some cars could have been affected if they were visiting the region and travelled to other parts of the country.
The degree of being affected will depend on many factors, how much non con fuel you already had in your tank, how much con fuel was added. Then there are the types of cars I understand Hondas were not affected for example. I think this will be more to do with the type of engine manageent fitted. It could get very involved if people start claiming for work done by garages that would not have been involved with the contamination.

It may expose how many rogue garages there are about. It may call in to question if there was any contamination, if in some cases just draining or diluting the old fuel and adding a engine cleaner to the tank could have clared up the situation rather than some of these £1000 plus bills, it wil be interesting to see what it exposes.

I have a small diesel for general work and a 84 fuel injected Opel Manta for everything else. I run that on Opitimax/V power with lead replacement. It doesn't like ticking over with fuel injection cleaner. Which was one reason I figured it wasn't ethanol but possibly something of a lesser concentration. The figures still have to have the correction of how many cars would have broken down any way because some cars do just break down