It almost happened

Muddydogs wrote:
From my experiance diesel in a gas truck or gas in a diesel doesn't just kill the truck or cost thousands to fix like auto dealers like you to believe. Out of probably a dozen pickups that have had the wrong fuel put in them all I have ever had done was draining the fuel tank of the wrong fuel and refilling with the right fuel. If the mistake was caught after only pumping a few gallons the tank is just filled the rest of the way with the right fuel and kept full for a few 1000 miles to dilute the wrong fuel as much as possible.

I deal with this at least once a summer.

Fordlover wrote:

We used to get these at the Ford dealership simi frequently. Seems like they were mostly company vans/trucks. The thing that sucked was the 40 gallon tank would be full of the wrong stuff, so you had to find a place to store 40 gallons of contaminated fuel, then pull the tank and clean. Never did any damage that I can remember, but those were the 7.3/6.0 diesel days, long before the sensitive Bosch fuel pump.

That was before Common Rail diesels that operate at 23,000 psi and higher. Those high pressure fuel pumps run at the ragged edge of performance for the materials of which they are made, and gas being such a poor lubricant, they'll grind themselves to shreds with very little provocation. When that happens, it is impossible to clean out all the metal shavings, and the only permanent fix is to replace everything the fuel touches from the fuel tank to the lines to the injectors to the fuel filter housing, and THAT's what is so expensive. If you try to go cheap and only replace the HPFP, you should plan on having to repeat that every couple thousand miles.