There is no check on ID when a card is used at a petrol pump at Tesco. If you lose a card and some louse finds it, you could find that he and his mates are filling their cars at your expense. I believe there may be a 'one use a day' limitation built in.
Not sure about at Tesco, but this was something that suprised me when driving in the US (where they don't have PINs anyway). You'd drive up to a pump, stick your card in, fill up, remove card, drive off! Struck me at the time you could just use one you'd found on the pavement, sorry sidewalk.
There is a maximum transaction value which keeps going up with the increasing fuel cost, but I think that is on a "per transaction" basis, not "per day" or whatever.
I used a Shell pay-at-pump station once; I seem to remember needing my PIN for that.
BP introduced pay-at-pump some years ago. It must have been a fairly expensive thing to have done, but they removed the facility after a couple of months. You can still see the blanking plates on the pumps at the local one.
Registration plates are always captured before the staff authorise pay-at-pump (and probably all) transactions.
There's usually around a £60 limit, with probably some background logic in the system to warn if people start using it a lot. And finally, it's an 'online' system - the second a card is reported stolen it won't work and will flag up on the staff console.
In the US all transactions are 'online' thus the second that a card is reported stolen, it can't be used for any transactions - that includes the pay-at-pump style systems.
In the UK it varies, some are offline, some are online. There's also certain limits set by the card itself, and additionally by the retailer which trigger an online transaction (eg number of offline transactions, size of current transaction, size of total transactions). This explains why sometimes you sit there at the till for ages whilst the shop person says "Oh, it's just dialling up" - it's going online for authorisation. If the card was stolen, it would be refused (and flagged to the staff).
Probably depends how likely people are to be nicking fuel. Which should make Conor feel good if the asdas round his way don't feel the need to check :-)
Ahh, okay, I've not seen an unattended Pay at Pump system - only that after 11pm or whatever, you had to use Pay at Pump, whilst staff sat inside the store.
They are normally -- there's still a delay whilst the staff are serving someone. Perhaps they switch it to automatic when there's no one there. But I've never seen Pay & Pump available without _someone_ around. (I'm sure it's available somewhere, though).
Only one I ever used was my local small Tesco which sells Esso. It had pay at the pumps option for a few months before withdrawing it. That needed your PIN.
MotorsForum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.