What happened when my daughter put diesel in my gas-powered car

Like many parents of families in a state as expensive as New Jersey, I allow my daughter to drive a 10-year-old Mazda I own. It’s a second car of mine, and my son also shares it with her the few times a year he comes home from college. They pay the gas and registration, I pay the insurance. It works for us.

One bill I was never expecting in a million years came in a Hail Mary effort to save the car a few weeks ago.

My daughter had to go back out to MEPS for Coast Guard business as she is enlisting. MEPS stands for Military Entrance Processing Station. This one is just outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

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It’s a several hours drive one way. She got there just fine and on the way back had less than half a tank of gas and didn’t feel she would make it home. She was a bit in the middle of nowhere and found an off-brand, rundown gas station between towns off the highway.

Now, let this be a cautionary tale. If you thought no diesel fuel nozzle ever would fit into any filler neck of a gasoline engine car, think again. Sometimes they can. Also, if you think all diesel nozzles come in a bright green like they do at so many name-brand gas stations in New Jersey, no, not all do.

The craziest part of this is that my daughter knows you’re not supposed to put diesel into a non-diesel car. But because she grew up in and learned to drive in this ridiculous state where pumping your own gas is illegal, she has limited to no experience pumping. She was more concerned with paying inside and what pump number she was on and how to turn the pump on than she was with making sure what she was looking at.

The nozzle handle was black. It fit into the fuel filler neck. She never noticed the word diesel on the pump.

Even once filled, she went on her way, with a tank now half filled with diesel and half with gasoline. At first, a majority of gasoline must have been feeding into the fuel system and less of the diesel because it did start up and, for a time, ran fine.

But soon, she was noticing that when pressing the accelerator, the car would sluggishly respond. The longer she drove, the more sluggish it became, with the Mazda taking longer each time to respond to the acceleration.

Once she was home, she still didn’t realize what she had done. Nor did she tell me the car was running so poorly. It sat in front of our house overnight. The next morning, it was time for her to leave for school. (She’s a senior in high school with a parking permit.) The car wouldn’t start.

It was a cold morning, and I had just put a new battery in the car about five days before her trip. Could the battery have been a lemon?

I went out to try to start it myself, and it wasn’t making the noise a dead or dying battery makes. I knew she was having the car towed.

I called AAA, and in two hours, the car was in the capable hands of the guys at Goodyear in Flemington on Route 202. My buddy Peter there (nicest guy in the world, by the way) called me saying, “I think this car is just out of gas.”

It wasn’t. He added a gallon or two of gasoline, and while it was inside the shop with all the bay doors closed because it was a cold day, it then started.

Sort of.

Oh, the engine started all right. But black jets of sooty smoke came coughing out of the exhaust. The smell hit all the mechanics at once. The smoke was so bad it very quickly filled the shop to the point where you couldn’t find your way back to the waiting area.

They knew then from the smell and smoke what had happened. Now, more often than not, when you accidentally manage to put diesel into a gasoline-powered vehicle, just starting the engine back up can be enough to kill it permanently.

They went through it painstakingly, looking for damage to the fuel pump. After draining all the fuel from the tank and checking everything in the fuel system, they found the plugs just caked in soot and gunk. Those were all pulled and replaced, other parts were changed and cleaned.

The Goodyear guys had warned me it probably couldn’t be done, but wouldn’t you know their expertise paid off, and they got it running again. It cost me a couple thousand bucks, but they saved the Mazda, and I couldn’t have been happier.

Warning. That is not the usual outcome. I am very lucky the car wasn’t totaled from this. And I somewhat blame New Jersey’s ridiculous laws against self-service gas as a contributing factor in this. If my daughter had to pump her gasoline here like everyone else, she would have had enough experience that she might not have been so distracted as to make such a costly mistake.

Hey, New Jersey Legislature, want to split the bill with me?

Opinions expressed in the post above are those of New Jersey 101.5 talk show host Jeff Deminski only.

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