You didn’t drive it for 2 miles on petrol what’s more likely is you drove it for 2 miles with petrol in the tank. Once the petrol made its way through the low-pressure sender pump, thru all the fuel lines, up to and through the filter (which holds about a pint of fuel), through the hoses to the high-pressure pump, thru the pump, into the common rail reservoir, and finally into the high-pressure lines into the combustion chamber, that’s normally the exact point that the engine stops turning, and you will find you maybe got about 20 yards on petrol, which is the time it took for the engine to stall. This is what happens if you put petrol in a diesel car. The good news is, this isn’t as catastrophic as you might think and there is a simple, effective solution for a mobile fuel drain – a service we provide all over the country and we attend most callouts within 50 minutes, 24 hours a day. many different things can happen with misfuelling, I have covered most of them below. 

This picture (below) is the suction line I use to remove the wrong fuel. this was taken when doing a job that had 50 litres of petrol in a diesel mini, this was being taken from the fuel tank as the car had not been started. this hose is full of fuel, about 70% petrol, and 30% diesel. 

This is a picture of the same hose, the car was a Diesel VW Polo, it has been fill’d with 90% petrol, and 10% diesel, the car had been left overnight after loosing power and being towed back to the customers house, the suction line was attached to the high pressure pump inlet, as you can see the fuel has gone black, this is becuase the petrol has desolved rubber in the fuel lines, this car sat for a day with a very strong mix of petrol, it had also been driven until failure, the dark colour is a mix of rubber and plastic that has dissolved in petrol (fuel hoses are made type specific to reduce costs for car manufacturers,i,e diesel for diesel hoses only and petrol in petrol hoses only), I would not expect this to have done the car any real harm over an 18 hour period, just a microscopic layer of fuel line has been stripped off from the inside, these lines are fairly thick so a short bit of contamination once is fine, if you do want to make a habit of misfuelling regularly and leaving the car sitting for days with the wrong fuel in it you will eventually need new fuel lines. and plastic fuel components. 

At the end of the day (or during a very busy day), I unload all of my mixed fuel into 220 litres of drums, at our garage, (a licence is required to store mixed fuel from the environment agency), the mix is collected every 7 to 10 days by a garage services company, these are the same guys who take away used engine oil, brake fluid etc.. from garages everywhere. the mixed fuel is batched sand separately and between me and all the other companies that offer this service, I would guess that there is between 50 to 200 thousand litres a week of mixed fuel “made” in the UK per week. – once it is batched up into viable quantities usually 28.000 litres (tanker load) it is refined in one of the main refineries using a distillation process – identical to the one used for making crude oil, the petrol-diesel mix separates at 60 – celsius, I,e the petrol fumes off, it is then condensed and I separated, from what I have heard this is done twice to get a proper result, I would assume that the mix would then go back into the supply chain and be used as it was originally intended!

It is very unlikely that you have, pretty much 1 for 1 callout I attend are back up and running again when drained, if you have not started your car, you will not have damaged it. if you have driven your car and it stalled, or would not re-start then the chances of any lasting damage are very slim, there’s a bit of a safety mechanism that works by default and it goes like “petrol will ruin your diesel car but your diesel car will not run on petrol long enough to get ruined, therefore, PETROL WILL NOT RUIN YOUR DIESEL CAR”  

One person every four minutes fills their vehicle with wrong fuel which can wreak havoc on the interior workings, with repair bills amounting to hundreds of millions of pounds every year. Putting diesel in a petrol engine will cause your engine to cut out and stop working. As diesel doesn’t ignite in the same way that petrol does, the spark plugs which ignites the fuel in your petrol engine will have no effect.
If you have put wrong fuel in your vehicle, follow these simple steps to get your engine started. 
If you want to get your engine to start again, all the fuel needs to be flushed from the fuel system and replaced with petrol or diesel. Call us now to get that done by our wrong fuel experts.

It’s hard to fill a petrol tank with diesel because diesel fuel nozzles are designed to not fit in petrol vehicles.
However, it is all too easy to accidentally fill your diesel-fuelled vehicle with petrol.
Petrol does a lot of damage to your diesel engine as it finishes the lubricant used to keep it ticking over and cause metal components to grate against each other which causes them to crack and decompose.
This just doesn’t damage the fuel pump and injection systems, it can also destroy the engine completely.

If wrong fuel is not drained properly from your vehicle, in a best case scenario, the fuel pump and injection systems will likely need to be replaced, but depending on the extent of the damage the entire engine could be wrecked beyond repair.