Tesco are trying to win back customers by offering 3p per litre of petrol/diesel for any clubcard customer when you spend 'any' amount in a Tesco Store, like the spend £50 & get 5p per litre off
I wonder how many will take them up on their offer or use Shell/BP?
Me for a start, but then again, driving an old fashioned diesel, sillystuff in the fuel wasn't an issue...
For added comedy value see....
Tom
Strange, it cost him £3400 to get his van repaired but only won £2690 ??
I wish I could have seen the Manager/ess's face when the Bailiff's turned up & stated that they would seize goods to a value of £60k
I wonder if they used their current lawyers for the court case? GAB Robins
It looks like they actually paid the 25%.
Bob
To try to limit liability and push you into accepting, Tesco would have paid
25 percent into the court before the hearing.Mrcheerful
I'm never going to use Tesco's petrol again. It's not that the fuel was contaminated, as I'm sure it was a genuine accident, but is was the way Tesco's denied that their fuel was contaminated. They argued that their experts had tested the fuel and found no contaminats. But they did a quick u-turn when it was proved by Trading Standards a few days later.
"Vopak, a fuel distribution company with a depot in Essex, said it was checking that it was not to blame."
"Verifications are continuing. At this moment we have not established any deviation from normal procedures.""
They're honest statements to me - especially considering everything was centred on excess ethanol at that point. They've tested their fuel and been unable to find any problems. I'm sure every litre of petrol from every retailer out there has some form of contaminant in it - probably at very low quantities, so low it makes no difference. The range of possible contaminants is pretty large. As pointed out after the fact: "The firm which refined the fuel, Harvest Energy, has said it will now routinely test for the presence of silicon in unleaded petrol, something it didn't do before, because silicon would not normally be found in the fuel."
Should they now also test for chlorine? How about uranium? Maybe even a bit of calcium?
The way I see it is that they tested it using their routine tests and couldn't find a problem. Think about the number of litres of petrol sold each year and that there hasn't been a case of this happening before. You cannot routinely test every litre of fuel for every possible contaminant. From now on though, I suspect every fuel refiner will be testing for silicon, and possibly many other possible cross contaminants. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.
For me though, I'm going to continue using Tesco petrol. I get more mpg out of their fuel than I do from Shell and Tesco don't clone my credit card when I pay - unlike my local Shell garage which caught 6 people I personally know, costing them each over £1500 (which admittedly they got back, but in one case, not the overdraft interest!!)
That's what mass spectrometers are for surely? I wouldn't have thought that it hard to run some though a MA and spot an unusual spike.
That seems a bit daft in retrospect when there was so much evidence builing up that there *was* a problem with the fuel. Just testing the fuel to see if it met the appropriate specifications using "routine tests" is no way to look for a contaminant.
Tim
But when the suggested contaminant (ethanol) was one of the things they routinely tested for it doesn't seem so daft, especially considering the number of cars which fuel up from them and the low proportion of cars which had a problem.
Whilst a high number of cars were affected, I think it's probably a low proportion of cars which visited Tesco petrol stations. I used one of the apparently affected ones around the same time (11 days ago), drive a Peugeot with ECU etc, yet haven't had a problem, nor noticed any change in my fuel consumption. Yet the press were claiming that Peugeot were one of the affected cars.
I doubt Shell or any other retailer would have done much different with regard to admitting fault. I very much doubt that Tesco would have continued selling petrol which they had internally *proved* to be contaminated. Belief is one thing, proof is another.
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