Ever wonder what happens when you put diesel into a gasline engine?

I admit, I have actually wondered, but have never been tempted to find out... Well, fortunately enough, here in France this morning, I found out first hand when I confused the pumps at the loca BP station and filled my new mini with diesel: for the first couple of kilometers everything is fine as there's still just gasoline in the engine. Then you start seeing a bit of a plume of white smoke behind you, and the car appears to be losing power. At this point, I start getting concerned, so head back towards the station that's supposed to be doing my control technique in a few hours. More power loss and more white smoke all along the way. Eventually, I can only move, or rather stutter along, in first gear with the choke all the way out. Back to the station in this shape. Hoping for the best, leave the car there, go into the city for a couple of hours (hello, Uzbekistan embassy), come back at the appointed hour of 2PM. Now the car simply doesn't start - the engine spins fervently, but doesn't catch. This is the point in the whole diesel/gasoline experiment where you curse for a while.

After a few conversations in broken French, it is determined that the station here only does the control technique, but doesn't actually fix things, and they don't know what's going on. The one across the street volunteers to take a look, and eventually figures out a problem. Observation: there's a very scientific method for determining if it's diesel or gasoline: first you look at it, then you smell it... Result: well, it looks like gasoline, but kinda smells like diesel. At this point they took a small sample away - I figured something more scientific is coming - a few minutes later, the verdict: diesel! The method? Fire! Gasoline explodes, diesel burns slowly...

The repairs were surprisingly simpler than I had expected - you empty the gas tank (and reuse the diesel in another car), rinse out the carburator, check the spark plugs (they needed to be replaced anyway as it turned out), add gasoline, and voila!

There is an upside to this whole experiment - I now have a mechanic looking at the car, fixing up the other things I'd wanted looked at, and tomorrow they will have the control technique done on it. The guy I was supposed to see this morning couldn't do anything until this weekend anyway, and that wasn't going to work for me all that well...