Fuel Quality

You are better sticking to a SHELL garage or ESSO garage if you want proper petrol. From experience I have always had problems with cheaper petrol as sold by Tesco. The cars I have used over the past 12 years never run as well, performance was down , MPG down and it cost more in the end. Shell and Esso give no problems. There are different grades and cheaper suppliers tend to fall just within specifications as to what is just about acceptable. When a tanker leaves a filling station additives are put in depending on where it is going to. Quality is like the difference between anything from M&S and a cheap brand.

The latest problem is probably nothing more than an exercise by the Government to see how many people they can force off the road IF they choose to do so. It's also a good way to earn extra income when garages put the price up to cover their losses. What the garages don't say is that they are claiming from the suppliers who are claiming off their insurers! So the price increase should not be passed on to the public.

They are claiming for the direct costs of the vehicles put off the road. They are not - and probably cannot claim for the increase in petrol price from the petrol sellers due to the demand spike for petrol.

My local Tesco sells Esso petrol from pumps with Esso logos on them.

That's a Tesco Express store. Basically an Esso station which has a Tesco store. You'll notice that you won't get clubcard points on the petrol there - only in-store purchases I believe.

D

Interesting thing i noticed from this fuel problem episode. People used to say all the petrol comes from the same refineries so supermarket petrol is as good as Shell or whatever. But this doesnt seem to be the case. The petrol that caused these problems seems to have only been used by Tesco and Morrisons. They also apparently buy petrol in from mainland europe. Also, the ethanol stats i saw in one report showed that tesco has been increasing the ethanol content of its petrol from about 2% to

5% recently. This can only be a money making excersise.

My car certainly runs better on Shell than on supermarket stuff.

In this case, I understand that Tesco are the only general retailers of

99 octane fuel. The fuel is supplied by Greenergy. A slightly tigher spec fuel (FIA spec) is also the provided for the British Rally Championships along with their 'forecourt' spec fuel. All the fuels are branded as Tesco 99 Octane.

The change in the demand for fuel to other retailers, along with the dumping of fuel from Tesco, Morrisons and Asda, has created a short term wholesale rise in demand for petrol. This in turn is likely to be reflected in higher fuel prices.

D

I wonder where the dumped fuel goes. I assume back to the refinery, where they tip it in at the start again.

All fuels have to get to a certain level so that they can be sold (This is the Tesco,asda,supermarkt spin/ story) So shell and all the other supermarket fuels attain that level, the truth is thst there are othe fuels that (with addtves) can get away wirh even more