Great Britain
Because of the rising fuel prices: Brite fills up his car with cooking oil
Vegetable oil instead of diesel? The ADAC warns of engine damage (symbol image)
© IMAGO / Hubert Jelinek
A customer dumped liters of cooking oil into his car’s tank in the car park of a UK supermarket. The ADAC warns against using vegetable oil instead of petrol or diesel.
Desperate situations require desperate measures: In view of the current record fuel prices, many have been joking for a few days about wanting to use cooking oil instead of petrol. A Briton took these jokes seriously – and put them into practice.
In the parking lot of the supermarket chain Tesco, he wheeled a shopping trolley with countless bottles of vegetable oil to his car. Once there, he unscrewed the caps from all the bottles and poured them one by one into the tank of his car. Another customer had filmed the bizarre situation and shared it on Facebook.
“He had clearly thought it through”
“I filmed it and when I walked past him he first took all the caps off the bottles which made me laugh. He’d clearly thought it through,” the observer told Cheshire Live.
The video went viral on social media. While some praise the man for his ingenuity and assume that the car would “just run well”, other users are rather pessimistic about the functionality of the vehicle.
ADAC warns against vegetable oil as a fuel substitute
One user writes: “Don’t pour vegetable oil in your car or van unless it’s an old diesel engine. You’ll ruin your engine, it’s too thick and you’ll blow up the diesel pump. And certainly not into a petrol car or van.”
So can you fill up old diesel cars with cooking oil? While the injection pump and nozzles of modern diesel vehicles are not designed for the more viscous vegetable oil, which would lead to less than optimal combustion, the situation is different with older diesel engines, says the ADAC. Those older engines are often not supposed to have sensitive sensors that would immediately recognize differences in running behavior with the wrong fuel. “Therefore, older diesel engines with distributor injection pumps run at least temporarily with vegetable oils,” according to the ADAC. However, their lifespan would also be reduced in the long term.
swell: “Cheshire Live”, ADAC