Unless your car has a diesel engine, you shouldn’t put diesel fuel in the tank. As our friend Brett Berk learned the hard way a few years ago, you also shouldn’t put gasoline in a diesel vehicle, although that mistake, while bad, wasn’t ultimately disastrous. Usually, it’s the person trying to fuel up their car who makes the mistake, but every now and then, the person filling up the storage tanks makes the mistake and ends up damaging far more cars. That’s also exactly what happened at a Sam’s Club fuel center in St. Clairsville, Ohio, WTRF reports.
It isn’t clear exactly when the fuel supplier added diesel fuel to the wrong tank, but drivers who had stopped at the Sam’s Club reportedly began to realize something was wrong over the weekend, when their cars refused to start. They began posting about their problems on Facebook, and eventually the truth came out — they’d inadvertently filled their cars with diesel instead of the 87-octane gasoline they’d tried to buy.Â
Currently, gasoline in Ohio is about $0.60 a gallon cheaper than diesel, which does technically mean they got that fuel at a discount, but that probably isn’t much of a consolation when their cars won’t start, and their engines now need an expensive trip to the mechanic that could potentially require a full replacement.
Sam’s Club won’t dodge responsibility
The good news is, most of the owners who ended up putting diesel in their cars probably won’t need new engines. As Jerry Witzberger, the owner of ASAP Auto Care, told WTRF, “Diesel is really, really thick for the gasoline engines. Hopefully it didn’t get through the whole system. But if you got it to the point where it won’t start the whole thing is going to have to be flushed and hopefully you have a better engine damage. And it will shut the car down.”
To its credit, it sounds like Sam’s Club doesn’t plan to pin the blame entirely on the third-party fuel supplier or leave its customers to sue if they want to recover to cost of flushing out their systems. Instead, they appear to be working with customers whose cars got bricked, with a spokesperson telling the news outlet, “We are actively working to address this situation and are dedicated to making things right for our affected members. We strongly encourage them to contact the club directly to submit a claim.”
It isn’t clear how many customers ended up with diesel in their fuel tanks before Sam’s Club learned about the mix-up, but good on them for taking responsibility. Ironically, though, this isn’t the first time Sam’s Club has dealt with diesel fuel ending up in a storage tank for gasoline. Back in 2023, the exact same thing happened in Fayetteville, Arkansas, basically in Sam’s Club’s backyard. You’d like to think this kind of thing wouldn’t happen, but hey, at least you know the Walmart-owned warehouse club has experience dealing with the problem.
