Greetings:

Friends of mine were shut down two weeks ago after buying "contaminated fuel" at a truck stop in Oklahoma.  He had three hard starts, one at the pump at the TS, but the F250 pulled their 15,000 pound fifth wheel into Amarillo, TX just fine once it started.  Just from this alone, I'm just not smelling contaminated fuel.  The Ford dealership gave him an estimate for repairs of $13,000.

Yes, that's correct.  I checked back with him.  Thirteen Thousand Dollars!

What on earth could have been in that fuel that would have caused this sort of a repair estimate?  Does anyone have any ideas?

The truck is a 2017, F250, diesel.

The first thing that caused me to question the fuel theory was how on earth did the bad fuel get to the engine for that first hard start sitting there at the pump perfectly stationary.  Would there not be enough fuel in the lines and fuel filter to start the engine and drive the rig around the truck stop a few times before any bad fuel could have made it to the engine?  He had no problems burning the previous tank of fuel that got him to Oklahoma.

The petro fuel industry has pretty much made water in fuel a thing of the past.  And it seems to me that a TS would be the least likely place to buy fuel with water in it.

What is the likelihood of high sulfur fuel being anywhere near a truck stop?  Even if that is the issue, would higher sulfur content cause this much damage?  His insurance company Rep took fuel samples for analysis.  No word yet from him what was found, or not found, in the fuel.  I know changes in sulfur content changes the lubricating qualities of the fuel.  But would that make it hard to start, yet run as advertised pulling a load?  Still, this would not be of any significance on the first hard start at the pump.

I'm thinking failure of an IC chip might be more likely to be the culprit here.  But I honestly have no clue as to what chip feeds data inputs to what other computers, nor the logic of what data is used for what.

I do know that one circuit on a chip can fail and the rest of the chip can work just fine.  The failed circuit might only affect one function or mode, allowing all modes not requiring that circuit to function just fine.

The real surprise to me was, there was never an error code generated.  Nor was there ever a check engine light.  Hummmmm.  That's odd.

Has anyone out there ever experienced, or known anyone to have experienced anything like this?  If so, would you care to post what the result was?

My friend doesn't have a clue either.  He and I have been scratching our heads trying to work out some logic and neither of us know modern vehicles very well at all.  It's just something we've been playing with while he and his wife are enjoying visiting tourist sites near Amarillo driving a rental car while they wait on their truck.

So far, my totally uneducated worst guess, with a low degree of confidence, is a computer lost a fuel input or a switching signal and isn't being switched to "start".  Or somewhere a "start" circuit just isn't working properly.  Since I just had to pay $1,000 to have a fuel pump replaced on an old station vehicle, that price to replace a computer these days just wouldn't surprise me to the point of fainting, almost though.  I'd still have to look around for the cameras.

Dave