And it was a woman driving it, don’t forget that. Her pretty little head didn’t know you can’t put diesel in an Audi.
Except you can in fact put diesel in this one.
Exactly, the primary message of this commercial is:
[ul]
[li]Diesels have a reputation for being a bit shit[/li][li]Audi cars are not shit, so you would not expect them to be diesels[/li][li]Therefore although its surprising and unusual that this Audi is diesel, it can’t be a shitty diesel, because we’re just too good for that.[/li][/ul]
Or in other words, the same sort of marketing as “I can’t believe it’s not butter”
I had no idea there are regular cars that run on diesel. I’m not sure that I’ve ever considered the possibility that anything other than semi trucks might run on diesel. If I were a more forthright person, I could quite possibly have been the idiot warning someone about using the wrong fuel. My friend did it once and it cost her 500 dollars which for a recently graduated college student was a bitter pill to swallow.
Since the question has been answered, can I hijack a bit?
If gas cars can recover from having diesel in the tank, but diesel cars seem to have more problems if they get gas in the tank, why aren’t diesel nozzles the smaller ones? That is, why is it difficult to put diesel into a gas engine but easy to put gas into a diesel engine, if the latter is worse for the respective engine?
Really, it’s got to be possible to design both so that *neither *fits the wrong one. I have a boxful of useless cell phone chargers which prove it’s possible to make a Tab A that won’t fit into *any *but the correct Slot B. 
But I suspect it’s cost and volume. If it was cheaper to make a nozzle so that it could fit both, better it be the gas one. Since so few passenger cars run on diesel, and even fewer in the past, it made more sense to protect the many many gas cars out there from user brainfarts.
I suspect because diesel users are more likely to be aware of what they’re driving and what fuel it needs and if getting diesel in a gas car happens often enough to be a thing that mechanics nod knowledgeably about, making it even easier to happen is probably not in our best interest.
The commercial is relying on the fact that few people in the general population know this.
So basically, it’s not the size of your nozzle-it’s what you stick it in.
I thought that might be the case. Also, if it’s used to fill pickups and semis, flow rate might be an issue with a smaller nozzle.
If diesel becomes an everyday thing for passenger cars in the US, I could see this becoming an issue.
I’ve seen diesel Mercedes in the U.S. back as far as 1985.
the commercial try to confuse
Yeah, there’s a lot of people talking about diesels being too new for people in the US to know about them, but I’d say the opposite is true. A lot of people are too young to remember diesel cars being sold in any great numbers in the US, which really only happened during a brief period in the late 70’s and early 80’s. The Japanese and European diesels of that period were super reliable but they were loud, smokey and slow. The GM diesel cars were loud, smokey, slow and very unreliable and pretty much soured Americans on diesels for the next three decades.
So, the commercial is probably playing on a little of both. The youngsters haven’t seen many diesel cars and the oldsters don’t think it’s a diesel because it didn’t rattle in with a cloud of soot behind it.
Yes, but the point is that the vast majority of diesel engines are inside large commercial trucks these days, and that someone putting diesel fuel into a seemingly normal (i.e. unleaded) tank has usually been cause for alarm since the 1970s, when the major push to unleaded occurred. I can’t remember when the standard was changed to make the nozzle for the diesel pump too large to fit standard tanks, but the immediate reaction to save someone a heap load of automotive repair bills still exists for a lot of us.
Well, they could adopt a colour-code standard. For gasoline, the nozzle and the filler valve could be red, while choosing blue for diesel. If the colours match, you’re okay.
I occasionally have to refill diesel military vehicles. In recent years, we’ve been using a diesel version of the Chevy Silverado and the oversize nozzle (meant for larger trucks) is a nuisance.
The Europeans have mostly solved the misfueling problem already. Most newer diesel cars sold there have a gizmo in the fuel filler that only allows you to insert the larger diesel nozzle. On Ford’s system, the same thing that blocks off incorrectly-sized nozzles also serves as the fuel cap, so it has the fringe benefit of eliminating a step in a fill up. The problem is that in North America the diesel nozzles aren’t standardized so it wouldn’t work here. I imagine if diesels did take off in any big way that’d be relatively easy to change, though.
I just figured it was Audi’s first diesel model. I have no idea if that’s true, and don’t really care. But, that assumption helps the commercial make sense. But, yeah, it’s not a great ad.
Another anecdote, now we’ve reached that part in the proceedings. As mentioned, diesel cars are more common in the UK, but my family had one, a Nissan Bluebird, in 1987 when they weren’t. My mum and I were both stopped at fuel stations while attempting to fuel, on more than one occasion. Typically it would be other customers helpfully warning us we were about to put diesel in. More than once the cashier delayed authorising the pump and spoke to me over the PA too. So, possibly not for the same reasons, but the ad has happened to me.
The other effect was that people would fairly regularly try to flag us down at night. They’d hear the very characteristic engine (and I guess then see the shape of the car) and assume we were a minicab, as diesels were most commonly semi-commercial then. Compare that to our last car before leaving the UK - a Jaguar XF diesel - nobody was going to identify that either as a diesel or a minicab.
I had a 1984 diesel Ford Escort. I loved the thing.
That is quite strange. I worked for Ford in 1979-83 and didn’t think we sold a diesel Escort in the U.S. Did you buy it as a standard buy through a U.S. dealer? Or did you do some sort of import deal?