Car and fuel question

[hawkida]

So I have filled up my car several times now, they have a tendency to drink petrol. I'd had no problems the first few times. Then, a couple of weeks back I had a few passengers and when I tried to fill the car would take a small amount of fuel before the pump cut out as though the tank was full. It did this repeatedly, taking about 70p - £2 of fuel at a time. Eventually, when the cost was what I expected to spend, I stopped. I had tried several different angles of pushing the hose's nose into the fuel tank, don't think I was doing anything different. I wondered if the car might be at a weird "laden" angle with all the passengers and asked them to get out, to no avail. So I put it down to a dodgy pump.

Today I just went and fuelled up at that same station, but a totally different pump and it's doing exactly the same thing. So, either my car's got something weirdly wrong with it, or I'm doing something stupid. My bet's on the latter. Any clues what it might be, anyone?

Comments

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I don't remember the behavior of the pumps being different in England, but I only drove there a couple of weeks, compared to 30+ years in the US, so consider this to be USA-based advice. (I suspect the auto cut-off on the pumps is essentially the same hardware in both countries, too.)

I've never found the tiny difference that load makes to make any difference in filling the tank. There's more difference than that in slope of pavement in filling stations. I am always careful to put the nozzle "straight" in to the filler opening, which may remove some variables.

The shutoff is back-pressure based, so if something is restricting fuel flowing into your tank somehow, that could cause this symptom.