Ford diesels dont like sainsburys

spanner16

Diesel44 wrote: »

I filled up at Sainsbury's in Bury St Edmunds on the friday before Christmas and have had problems ever since.
Fiesta 52 plate diesel starts up ok, go down the road a few miles and the engine slows down and flashes up EAC fail on the dash.
It has stalled on me a couple of times, failing to start afterwards, give it about 20 minutes and it fires up again.
My local mechanic should be open tomorrow.
Must be down to the diesel, car has never played up before.

Sainsbury at BSE is my local garage and I fill up there more than any other, can't say I have ever had a problem, My diesel is on 185K and is still going strong

spanner16

Inactive wrote: »

Nor me, my local Tesco is like pig sty, they charge more for petrol than my village garage.

Oh of course they give away these wonderful Tesco Points ( pass me a bucket ).

Every little helps, yeah, helps Tesco.

I don't know where all you guys live but the local garages are always more expensive than the supermarkets around here

spanner16

newfoundglory wrote: »

I'd really love to know the answer to all this supermarket fuel debate.

To me - it makes sense to assume that all the money big oil companies spend on R&D means they are bound to contain different additives and detergents depending on whether you fill up with Shell or BP or Esso or Texaco etc. So, to say your car is smoother or more efficient with one and not the other could very well make a lot of sense.

BUT, what about the supermarkets? They are going to be supplied by the same big players... so what about the additives? I suspect supermarket fuel does not lack additives and detergents, but rather it does not contain the same ones that a lot of money has been spent researching and developing. But I could be wrong.

So, as long as my local Shell is the same price as my local Tesco... i'm going to Shell. Every little helps:D

There is no answer to the debate... there is no empircal evidence to show any difference in basic fuels, there will be differences from refinery to refinery and there will be regional differences. The supermarkets no doubt deal anywhere they can so you probably take pot luck on which of the oil companies have supplied them so if your Ford doesn't like Shell for example, you have no way of telling if what you are buying from the supermarket has been supplied by Shell. The "evidence" for the debate only comes from owners and that is very subjective, you would have thought that if the argument was so easy to prove then one of the motoring organisations, publications or TV programs would have done it, they haven't so what does that tell you?. The answer I got from the the oil companies that I got a response from is that the only additives put in post refinery are to give premium fuels and that the basic fuels have no extra additives.

newfoundglory

spanner16 wrote: »

There is no answer to the debate... there is no empircal evidence to show any difference in basic fuels, there will be differences from refinery to refinery and there will be regional differences. The supermarkets no doubt deal anywhere they can so you probably take pot luck on which of the oil companies have supplied them so if your Ford doesn't like Shell for example, you have no way of telling if what you are buying from the supermarket has been supplied by Shell. The "evidence" for the debate only comes from owners and that is very subjective, you would have thought that if the argument was so easy to prove then one of the motoring organisations, publications or TV programs would have done it, they haven't so what does that tell you?.

Its got absolutely nothing to do with the basic petrol or diesel. Its pretty clear that everyone is supplied by the same refineries. Its about the additives and lubricants which are put into the basic fuel, depending on who the customer is and where its going.

If you take Shell "fuel save" and ignore for one minute the marketing hype - it must, as a basic fuel, contain some sort of additive which the others don't - careless of whether it appears to have given you more miles per litre or not.

Look here: http://www.chevron.com/products/oronite/products/gas-additives.asp

"offers a full line of Gasoline Deposit Control Additives to meet our customers' cost and performance targets"

Assuming that the UK market operates like this, it may mean that even if two or more UK supermarkets are supplied by the same big brand name the additive packages could still vary even between supermarket garages to meet supermarket-specific cost targets.

Rossy.

Inactive

spanner16 wrote: »

I don't know where all you guys live but the local garages are always more expensive than the supermarkets around here

Tesco charge as much as they can get away with, my nearest Tesco is 6 miles in one direction, with a major supermarket monopoly, Asda and Sainsbury's are 8 miles in the other direction, my local village garage has to compete with Asda and Sainsburys.

So my village garage is always cheaper than Tesco.

pwllbwdr

I bet Ford don't recommend BP on their American market cars...

Rossy.

pwllbwdr wrote: »

I bet Ford don't recommend BP on their American market cars...

Not after they destroyed half of the east coast huh


Oil companies... gotta love 'em

bigjl

I think to blame BP for the disaster in the US is a bit much, it wasn't even their Rig or their staff on the Rig, wasn't Halliburton involved a lot more than BP, but as Halliburton is a company well connected in the US and made a fortune in Iraq with government contracts and has a history of being a typical corporate american beast then I think it was inevitable that the US government would try and blame the entire thing on the only non US company involved.

Though I had to laugh at Barrack Obama calling them British Petroleum all the time when that name no longer applies, anything to try and blame a non American company.



To get back to what Spanner said, with the reduction of sulphur and the need for diesel engines to be more and more efficient and powerful do you not think it is inevitable that this increased complexity and high state of tune would lead to fuel sensitivity.

I personally think it is only to be expected, especially when you consider that old school diesels will happily run on straight veg oil, modern ones struggle to run on decent biodiesel sometimes.

I did read somwhere for example that the old 1.9 tdi VAG engine will run happily on biodiesel, but the same basic engine with the PD injection system was not rated by VAG to run on biodiesel over a certain percentage.

I read this on a biodiesel (USA, VAG site) site years ago and have no point of reference, or even a web address, just a bit of info that has stuck in my mind about the biodiesel situation and seems relevant to this discussion, basically the same engine but the newer injection system is more sensitive to fuel quality.

Not to mention the need to run the PD on a special grade of oil to stop top end wear.


The repeated mention of all the fuel comes from the same place is not really relevant, as I think there is an agreed consensus that the main issue is more likely to be additives, rather than the basic refined diesel, though it isn't beyond the realms of possibility that during production some fuel is of higher quality than others, and even though they all pass quality control the oil company that owns and runs the refinery will send the poor quality stuff to the supermatkets, after all that is what I would do.

Also another thing to consider was the problem with petrol contamination in Essex and East London a few years ago, it only affected supermarkets, my wifes Mondeo, 1.8 Zetec had issues, ahe used Tesco but I had no such problems, Subaru Legacy 2.0, and I used Esso and BP at the time, both positioned within a mile or so of supermarket stations that had sold dodgy petrol.

Obviously we are talking about petrol not diesel in this instance, but I think it shows that it is unlikely that BP and Esso sell their fuel to supermarkets, otherwise the contamination, caused at the refinery, would have affected all suppliers in the area.

Lum

pwllbwdr wrote: »

I bet Ford don't recommend BP on their American market cars...

Diesel cars are comparatively rare in America so this won't be an issue for them anyway.