You're right. You need a door, man. It's not an even-the-nerf gun that's got Trinkler with a dotho. We'll definitely end up in that.
Good morning, good afternoon, evening. You're listening to the All Talk Car podcast, 4-House Again Tonight hosted by Perronas. We've got Helle, Mustafa, in One End of the World. Riggings.
And I've got Roscoe, ladies at the other end of the world. Oh, hello, everybody. How are we? We're going to talk about something really serious tonight, especially for listeners who've borrowed someone's pride and joy and went, oh shit, I put the wrong petrol in the tank.
The car won't start. So basically joining us tonight, we've got Simon Laverie, an Operations and Business Development Manager for a company called Wrong Fuel Risk. And I think that's a great name because one says on the box is what you guys do. You put Wrong Fuel in the car, they'll risk you.
They'll risk you. Simon Walker. Thank you. Thanks for inviting me.
No, thank you for coming on me. Yes, basically, like I said, it is what it is on the box. I'm going to laugh story, Pete. Yeah, I've got to be busy as well, but it happened to us right.
Oh, it's happened. It's happened more than once. And we've used these guys plenty of times. And I've got obviously a fleet of drivers on the road and sometimes they don't realise that petrol is going to be a lot of people.
They don't realise that petrol is diesel. And God knows what else is on the pump. It's different. They stick the thing in and start pumping fuel and start the car.
And so I put the wrong fuel in the past. You have to get the thing towed, freak out, set it to the mechanic. But it was the point where the survey guy turned around and said, hey, what you call the rescue guys? The rescue guys.
Well, Superman, the song was going to come down. The rescue guys came out. It was actually quite an American. They got the vehicle back on the road.
They had about five or six different guys. The guys really tested and challenged these guys. Let's ask Simon. So basically I've put the wrong fuel in the car.
I've got the service station. What do I do? Okay, so if you've put the incorrect fuel in the car and you're at the service station, make sure you don't start the car. The first thing is that any time that you start the engine, the potential for damage is there.
So as you say, you can go into the survey, ask them for the car, but really what you should be doing is googling wrong fuel rescue straight away. Give us a call. We'll organise to come out and get it started for you again. So basically you guys are mobile.
You've got a fleet of cars with hands on the road. Yeah, that's right. We've got 11 vehicles nationwide. So basically we're always prepared.
If you give us a quick call, we can come out as you say. It takes about an hour. Usually we're there within an hour. All depending on how much workload is there.
And we can come out and sort of out for you. And how often does this happen? Is it as stupid as it sounds? Well, enough to build a massive business.
I'm not sure if you've got an actual one business out of it, but does it happen all the time? It does happen consistently. So we as a company, we deal with about between six and seven thousand of these a year. Wow.
And we're probably not even a quarter of the market. There's a lot of those that happen in remote areas that happen outside of our service areas, things like that. But we are the actual, we're the primary company that services this industry. And yeah, we're not over probably anywhere between six and seven thousand a year.
COVID is obviously slowed that down a little bit. People aren't moving as much as they used to. But certainly, yeah, it's still a prolific issue. And then the obvious way is putting diesel and petrol and petrol and diesel.
Is that the most common problems? Yeah, definitely. So we find that about 90% of our work is a diesel vehicle that's had petrol added to it. Whereas if we looked at the other breakdowns, the petrol vehicle around about the 10% there.
And it's funny that one is quite sporadic. That really sort of comes in waves. So the petrol into diesel will happen all the time. Whereas your diesel into petrol happens on a like a price cycle thing.
It must have a contributing factor as to why it happens. Okay. Yeah. Is there a different nozzle?
No. There is. So the different size and there are also different colors. But then you go down the specific branding within the different service stations.
So if someone's using a service station, they're not familiar with, it's more likely to happen. And if somebody's using a service station that they've entered from a different direction or had to pull up at a different browser. We creatures have habit. We always fill up at the same browser if we can.
We tend to go down to the local servo or something like that. And when something's a little different and we don't notice it, it can have that effect. Yeah. You're right though, because a lot of servos have their own colors.
At the moment, Ample Caltex is rebranded to Ample. And everything's like the diesel is still black. It's called the fuel that I'm not used. It's changed colors to silver.
Every time I pick it up, I have to look at it double check triple check. Ask him for a friend sign. What's a different speed petrol into diesel? Yeah.
petrol and diesel. Yeah. How could it cause so much damage? Well, diesel's an oil.
So it's the primary lubricant for the engine, for the fuel system, for the engine. So whereas petrol is a solvent. So therefore, if you add a solvent to an area where it's supposed to be an oil, you're actually cleaning away the oil properties and therefore you don't get any lubrication. So you're damaging the engine, like the internals or the guss of it?
Yeah, definitely. So certainly significant damage to fuel system components, which are under high pressure. They have low tolerance. Also, because petrol is flammable, it has a, it's quite volatile.
And when it's, when you end up in the situation of adding petrol to diesel, it increases the volatility. So therefore you end up in a situation where the timing goes out on the engine, it increases the temperature of the engine, you get detonation, which then destroys engines. So can I put, okay. So you said petrol into diesel is bad.
Can I just do diesel in with lubrication? Extra lubrication that will go faster? No, it doesn't look like that. Diesel into petrol.
Yeah. So I was going to try that tomorrow. When it goes back, it's like two straight versus normal. Yeah.
Two different. Okay. Just tick. I'm just tick.
You can see what I've used you guys. Six times. That's okay. Unfortunately, when you go the other way around, what you've got is that you've got a vehicle that requires that volatility.
It needs that so that it gets its spark and it's push. And what you're doing is you're adding an oil combustion temperature, just don't reach that. And it can't burn the diesel. So what it does is it basically ends up with a lot of smoke and eventually fails the spark plugs.
The other problem that you get is you can end up with a lot of diesel down into the catalytic converter. So once you get the vehicle going again, you've got a lot of this high energy fuel that can cause melt down situation in your catalytic converter, which can be quite expensive as well. I'll take my cats out. That's fine.
I'll go try tomorrow. Do as well. Yeah. So let me say to start, like if you realize the problem at the service station or immediately just sit, wait, the technicians will come out and I'm guessing what they flush the engine.
How would they diagnose what they do? Well, so basically what the principle problem is that you've got the wrong fuel. Yeah. Okay.
So the reality is that what needs to happen is that the fuel needs to be removed and it needs to be replaced with the correct fuel. So that's the fundamental basics of what we do. Obviously it's a lot more technical than that. You can't just basically lift the lid and take fuel out and things like that.
We've got our specialist equipment. We've got our specialist procedures, things like that. That can all be done at a mobile at the roadside with the type of equipment that we've accessed. The best thing that you can do is to not actually start the vehicle.
Once you've started the vehicle, it goes up through the engine and it actually creates more work and it also creates potential for damage. So anything you can do to prevent any potential for damage is the best. You next step, it really is the fun call. Ring up, book in, get the job done and make sure that it's 100%.
So basically your trucks are equipped to remove the fuel because you can fill up the 60, 70 and maybe up to 100 in some vehicles. So removing the fuel is probably the first thing that would happen to happen. Yes. Then you obviously probably put in a couple of litres of the correct fuel.
Then crank it or the EOS has some diagnostic type. You can hook up the engine to see if the damage is a bit more than that. We do diagnostics on engines. We do carry a scan tools so that we can actually check and make sure the real of these.
If it's at a service station and you haven't started the engine, none of that fuel has gone through the engine as yet. So there's less of an issue there. Generally at a service station, we can remove the fuel. We can add the correct fuel.
It's not so much of a couple of litres at a petrol station. You can fill them right up, which is the right thing. We still do the diagnostics at that point just to make sure. That's where we tend to pick up some pre-existing conditions and things like that for the benefit of a customer in that situation.
Just to make sure everything's done right, part of the technical part of this process is that you can get issues around not getting it all out. We like to pick that up straight away so that we make sure that the quality of the job is 100%. We do go a little bit further in terms of if the vehicle's been driven. So obviously the incorrect fuel is accessed in different areas of the fuel system and we have to make sure that we leave that fuel system with an integrity of the correct fuel at all times.
So if it happens within, but obviously if you drive away from the server and it's like 5 minutes after a ship, what have I done? You can still save the engine. I'm thinking I'm down the road at the cost now. The current, you can save it.
Approximately 60% of the jobs we do are at a service station. The other remaining 40% generally have been driven, whether it be a short distance or a reasonable distance. We find that most of these are salvageable. There's got to be some damage, but the reality is that it's that that minor that that the salvageability rate is high.
The type of repair that we do increases that salvageability rate. So you'll find that even if you do drive the vehicle best thing to just pull over at the safest point, make sure that you're in a safe area. We can come out and we can actually organize to sort the vehicle out at that point. Nothing I was going to ask is it's not only petrol, diesel, diesel, petrol, but what if you've got shit fuel?
What happens when your car's just not running right? Is that something you guys can help out as well? It is, we can. We certainly do have a good success rating in that area.
Generally with that one there, like contaminated fuels, things like that, we can certainly remove all of those from your tank. We can replace the fuel. But if you've got situations where you've got contaminants that are quite severe, you may require further repairs down the track on that one. I know what you were saying about the bank slightly car after you put the fuel in it.
Many years ago I pulled up at the servo and left the engine running. I put the fuel in it. It wasn't the wrong fuel. It had water in it because the car store, while I was filling it up, I thought something was wrong.
I thought something was wrong. I thought it was a water in the fuel. The tanks were contaminated. Sometimes it takes a leak.
It's not. They've been out there for decades. Basically I'm filling up and the car store. It's like, okay, something's wrong with the car.
Whatever. Keep filling up and go inside the petrol. So I came back out. So I just pulled the hose off where the fuel line was in the engine bay and cranked it again into an empty water bottle.
I rotted it and guess what? It was water. It wasn't petrol, it was water. Yeah, it was pretty much all water.
It was a bit of fuel in it. Actually, because it happened right there at the servo, they shut all those tanks down. That takes the whole freight on an engine vehicle. With water in fuel, it will shut down.
Once again, water is similar to the diesel. The car can't burn. Water doesn't burn. Unfortunately, you will find after major weather events that you will get certain service stations that are subject to water in the tanks.
Water is heavier than petrol. We'll always sit on the bottom of the tank. So when the tanks are compromised, that water will always be the first one to appear. We could have water in our tanks now.
I always feel it halfway. If you've got water in your tank very quickly, because the water always sits on the bottom. It's heavier than the petrol. It doesn't mix.
So they're what's called an immiscible liquids. So basically, petrol and water or diesel and water don't mix. They stay separate. So basically, the water will sit on the bottom of the tank.
And therefore, when you start the engine or try to run the engine, it's only drawing the water that's off the bottom. And you notice very quickly. And if you had any stories from absolute disasters where someone filled up and then half petrol, half diesel, a bit of octane booths are in there. So we'll throw some water in and see how it will get.
Look, we do. And unfortunately, yeah, out of the 7,000 a year, we do come across the ones that have actually driven to the point that the pumps bind. I've seen high pressure pumps that have snapped in half. We've also seen injector failures.
We had a poor girl recently travelling in Queensland that was hell bent on getting out of the lockdown zone. And yeah, made the $5,000 decision to keep driving. Those are things that, look, we're all human people do what they do. You get the situation where people say, oh, well, I didn't put much in, so I'll just top it up.
Yeah, so let's say I'll go in and put two litres of diesel into my petrol engine. You know what, I want to put 58 litres of normal petrol. It should be OK. It's all fuel.
It's all fuel. But that's a work that way. And unfortunately, yeah, that's a lot of mechanic. Yeah, that's a lot of mechanic.
Unfortunately, in the old days, and then there's still a lot of older day mechanics that say that, oh, she's right to top it up and over the top. But the reality is the risks are high. That diesel, like if you're talking about petrol, that diesel can't be burnt in the petrol engine. So it's got to end up in a catalytic converter.
So how much can a catalytic converter take before it goes into the meltdown? It could be quite costly. Sorry, sorry. So if you just put in two litres, oops, I made a mistake and then switch over to petrol.
That's still enough to call you guys out because... Yeah, definitely. At the end of the day, yeah, it's cost effective to call us out because your risks are high, particularly in a diesel engine. So think of it from the point of view of that.
You've got a diesel engine that has a specific timing for the engine. We all know about timing. If the timing's too far advanced, you get pinging, detonation, creates heat, destroys engines. The actual injection sequence on that engine is designed to inject at the right time so that that diesel actually starts to expand once the piston has gone past top dead center.
If you increase the volatility of that fuel, you increase the timing, the reaction rate. So what happens is that you put two litres of petrol in there, you've just increased the volatility of that fuel all round. So now what you're starting to see is detonation, you're starting to see that the timing's too advanced because the petrol reacts too quickly. So therefore, what happens to an engine when the reaction is before it hits top dead center to the power stroke.
It can only change it into heat or noise, so therefore you get your rattling, you get your detonation, stuff like that. You blow holes and pistons, burn the end off, injectors, glow plugs, things like that. And that can all happen from just two litres of petrol being added to a diesel engine. I'll leave this talk to that and keep going.
It's because of the worry. The manufacturer is actually clearly state zero tolerance. There has to be something like some point, but the reality is to find that point, there's been no research, there's no documented papers on the internet to say what is an allowable amount. There's nothing other than people who actually publish their horrific stories of I destroyed my engine.
And that's the risk against the minimal cost of fixing the problem correctly. And can I ask a question? What's happened? The wrong fuel in my car, we drive down the road, I've topped it up with petrol, it's a diesel car, I've topped it up with petrol, I've added some octambusic, I've driven 15 corners down the road.
Of course, you guys, you guys walked in and you're crazy, we can't fix this. But is that insurable? Can I bring up the insurance companies? I'm an idiot.
I've put petrol in my diesel car, I've blown the motor up, I've tried to fix this situation, I've tried to fix this situation, did you just sit and work with one motor up the cars and drive it? It's beyond repair, is it something that the insurance companies can cover? Or you would know? Most of the insurance companies have written it out of the PDS.
Oh yeah. If you have a look at a lot of the product, the slides and statements they've actually clearly stated in there that they don't cover the incorrect fuel oil or anything like that added to the vehicle. There are some niche companies that do cover some misfueling. We do some workforce insurance companies, but the majority of them have actually written it out of the PDS.
But the reality is when it comes down to it, if you look at the amount that they would have to pay for their excess, that wrong fuel rescue is a far better option anyway, it's well under the excess advice people. I'm going to add another layer of complexity, because I've noticed on your website, you guys do a lot of work with some rental companies. What if I rented a car and put the wrong fuel in? Do I review first?
Or do I ring the high company? And again, going back to Russell's question, why I've covered under their policy? Well, generically, if you hire a car, you've got to put your credit card down as a bond payment, or you have to pay extra for insurance. A lot of them, you'd have to go back through the PDS statements once again, what's covered, what's not.
We do a lot of work for high companies. It's simply because a lot of people that hire those cars aren't familiar with what type of fuel and things like that. The reality is that if you ring the high company and the high company takes it back, they will hit you that full amount of bond. And if it's not covered by the insurance from the high car, you're up for the whole lot.
So yeah, really it is cost effective to ring us, resolve the issue, go continue on your holiday on your work that you're doing. And that's the reason that you hire the car. That's the other issue is that it's not a matter of Miss Fueled and I ring the high company and I get a replacement car a lot of the times that's not a feasible option. You end up in a situation where you've got you've got to go on hire another car because they're without a car now.
We do a fair few high company cars and it's quite successful. It's a very good fleet of range. It's definitely worth using on a continuum. So do you guys keep a statistics of what cars suffer damage and how many of them are cameras?
I would say that probably the lower rate of cameras simply because they're petrol vehicles and we only, yeah, they're. And we established before you said when you're petrol. Is that right? No, obviously.
Camera is a successful job. We do a lot of cameras. We do a lot of hybrid cameras. A lot of hybrid vehicles in general.
Yeah, certainly we do. We do tend to keep statistics on a lot of areas, but you would understand that manufacturer or brand specific is quite sensitive information. The other thing I'm going to ask you as well, I had a sat diesel and had a separate hole for a blue. Now, is that is that more European or have you had issues with that blue going into the wrong text as well?
Yeah, I'd blue is a serious issue. Unfortunately, I'd blue is a an area where salvageability rates are extremely poor. Unfortunately, even if you were to take a vehicle to a conventional repair, you would find that the salvageability rates are very poor. It's quite a corrosive substance.
So if you've started that vehicle and it's gone up through the fuel system, a lot of times the vehicle is not economic to repair. Wow. Look, I understand why I'd blues around. It's an environmental thing.
The concept of AdBlue is quite a very good for the environment, but the working still actually make it work somewhat. Yeah, the difficulty is too corrosive. You basically got to concentrate. I know the AdBlue was a bright blue.
They're not too open. They've got too holes. It's quite easy to make that mistake. Definitely.
Even down to the point where to make it much easier for AdBlue users, there is actually a Bowser's at some of your larger service stations, trucks, and things like that. And it's an AdBlue Bowser. So it has a dispenser that's very similar to a petrol or a diesel dispenser. And it's got the added issue that when you look at the Bowser, it's 75 cents a liter.
So everyone goes, wow, that's cheap. Unfortunately, it's not cheap if you've done that. I never thought of the price. If someone sees a price of things, that's cheap, I'm going to fill it in because you're right, because petrol prices go from $1 to $1.90.
And diesel is consistently $1.39 to $1.40. And I can't believe how sometimes people, not a fan is a price driven and how that's also a fact. I never thought of that. I thought it was just a made of just color coding and things like that.
And certainly, I believe that petrol or diesel is a begraged buy. You have to buy it. It's a bit like tolls. So if you can find cheaper, you always go to that.
That's why you got your successful schemes like your supermarkets with their four cents off and things like that and your price cycles. That's why that occurs so much is simply because everyone is trying to chase that cheapest price. So, how long do you want to go to? How long do you want to go to?
The company of Wrong Fuel Rescue started off in Perth in 2015. One vehicle. And it's grown into a quite successful company. We're pretty much now the experts in the field.
We're the largest misfilling company within Australia. We now have 11 vehicles across five states, 20 highly trained technicians who do an extremely good job. What's the percentage of the car being salvaged by the road? Or can you take it to a second level?
Your garage as well? You can get the car fixed. Our salvageability rates are extremely high. We're talking vehicles that aren't mobilized down in the 0.00.
We're probably 100 vehicles out of that 7,000 that we haven't been able to get going in. And they're facility things like Audi's with spark plugs that take days to get the spark plugs out. It's a real minor event even down to the point where we offer a no start, no fee for our customers. So if we come out to you and you're in the unfortunate situation that you have damaged your engine or it's a vehicle that can't be mobilized for whatever reason.
We don't charge you for the service. And that's how our minor their frequency is. It's pretty good. But you'll get the dive though, is it like you give the customer a level of understanding of what's really gone wrong and whether they need to contact the manufacturer or the car?
Yeah, definitely. We'll support them as much as we can. At the end of the day, the fact that the customer has engaged us for their misfueled event, they're now our customers. So it's important to us to make sure that we do a really good thing.
Fantastic. Well, I said I've used it plenty of times at work because I've got all the drivers in and out of vehicles. The first time I got the call I was like, just call them a mechanic, get it towed to the mechanic and the person at the service. And we call these guys and we now use it every time.
It's like I think they'll worry with the wrong fuel. Just call these guys up. We know what to do. And you come with an unreasonable time where what Ross has said towing it to the mechanic.
That may not be cost effective. I mean, it may take, you need to wait for the tow truck. It's going to get to the mechanic. Most of the times my product, my vehicle's full of products.
You need to track the move. There's no option to sit. I'm going to look at it next week. Basically, look at the pros and cons of the business side where you can pretty much get back on the road within an hour or two.
That's part of the benefits of the business. Generally, it's we've got good coverage. So we will be out there within an hour, takes less than an hour for us to do our full process. You're up and running again, driving away.
And as you say, if you've got a trade vehicle or something like that, you're not making money while you're stuck in the server. Your vehicles don't make money if they're sitting in a dealership for a couple of weeks until they can get to it. And you provide not only just an individual customer ringing, but you also, for Ross's case, where you've got a fleet of vehicles, you can provide some kind of contract or an arrangement with a company that's got 10, 20 vehicles. Yeah, definitely.
One of the largest fleets that we deal with has got about 140,000 vehicles. So we're quite good at providing those services. It keeps businesses like that on the road and making money. I just didn't realise how dangerous it can be for the vehicle.
Even two liters of petrol and diesels that damaging. I can tell you a story of vacuum early days in Miss Fueling. I wasn't convinced. I knew of the Miss Fueling issues and the problems that were around there.
And I was actually working for an insurance company at that time. And we were dabbling in the idea of Miss Fueling. We had a vehicle that had been misfueled. It was claimed on insurance.
It went to the dealership. I won't tell you what dealership it was. They had difficulty diagnosing it. And then they actually came back to the insurance company and they quoted $65,000.
Because they had difficulty diagnising it, they actually pulled the sample for the engine because they thought it was mechanical failure. And they found some metal filings on the magnet of the sump plug, which then in the reality is this is a car with 4,000 kilometres on it. It must have been some casting steel or something like that. It had nothing to do with the Miss Fuel event anyway.
So they quoted for an engine replacement. They quoted for replacing the fuel tank, all sorts of other things. The fuel cap has to be replaced because apparently that's somehow gets damaged. Anyway, they quoted for all that.
It was a less than a year old, the vehicle. So it was a new for all replacement. So the insurance company was looking at $120,000 to replace that with a brand new vehicle. We did the job and I think it came out to about $700 or something.
The car was driving around and it's still driving today. And how is your car driving? It's not mine. I can tell you now I never had $120,000 in my life data by a vehicle.
Somebody did say Freddy's. It's probably one of the insurance companies that printed out for 10 years because it's very easy to do insurance from $200,000 to $200,000. Yeah, right. The expensive costs of fixing it are dealerships and mechanics is why they wrote it out.
It was costing them way too much money. It's not only insurance companies that are bearing those costs. A lot of customers who believe in the dealership network and believe in their mechanics will actually take their big two dealers and they will pay those sorts of, not 65,000. But certainly I've heard anything anywhere from $2,500 right through $30,000 to replace injectors and pumps and stuff.
And the reality is you don't know whether they've failed. They're replacing them because they're saying, well, this is what the manufacturer says that needs to happen in this event. It's quite a costly exercise. And that's where our option is so good for the customer in terms of it.
They ring us up, they make the decision. Within a couple of hours, they're back on the road. All the problems are gone. And that's it.
That's brilliant. As I said, I've used them, I've used them many times and it's a savour fleet. It's absolutely fortunate. So I'm going to plug away how to listen as fine and how do they go about using it?
So go down to put the wrong picture on it. And then what do we do? Go out there, guys. So basically we have a dispatch team.
We have pretty much 24 access on that. The 1320-820. Just Google is wrong for your rescue. You'll see that our Google profile is very strong.
We have a lot of very happy customers that we've serviced over the years. We have websites there. We have Facebook. We have pretty much every platform that you could possibly think on and the social media and stuff like that to get the message out there.
The other one is that we always drop our cards in at the service stations to make it easier for the service stations to be able to deal with the issue. Service stations love us. They don't like the idea of a car sitting at a browser for ages, or tow trucks and things like that. And also they like the idea that we do a proper job.
We've got the specialist equipment, all the licensing, all of that sort of stuff. So that you don't have that issue of fuel being spilled on the driveway and all of that. I'll finish the story. I had a client of mine who got charged.
He thought he'd do it himself by removing the fuel. And basically it's a fuel that's available equal. You can't just let it run down the drain. And he did that.
You know that. No. Because he did it on the side of the survey, the survey ran a police. Because the survey didn't want to get blamed for any pollution leaking from the survey.
So the actual survey adopted me and he got charged for it. So I guess Simon, your crew know what they're doing and environment protection, EPA laws, your service would satisfy all those rules of legislation. So we're fully licensed. We have EPA licenses in every state fully compliant to all of the regulations, dangerous goods, all of those sorts of things.
Repera license. It's certainly not a backyard of business. We are the experts in that field. And it takes a fair bit to get to that point.
So yeah, I would suggest to anybody. Don't have a go at it yourself. There's just so much stuff that's there. And the EPA is one of them.
And I can save you a thousand if not losing your car. Thank you for coming on. That was very fun. Have a good week.
We get our listeners a little lesson in the chemistry and petrol and diesel and saving the money. And so thank you very much. I'm coming on. Rate us.
Review us. Download us. Send us your questions to all talk at outlook.com.au. You know where to find Simon and his team at Wrong Fuel Rescue.
Look them up. They pretty much offer a great service for a mistake that you may think is the end of the world. So, mate. Thank you again for coming on.
Thanks. Bye for now.