Poor design

Oh dear. I have this as well, but it doesn't work if the car is not

Have you tried popping the flap when its locked?

Each of the several cars of which I have use makes a feature of automatically locking all the doors when the car has passed a very low speed (at a guess, about 10 - 15mph). You can hear the clunk as the locks close.

Depending on how old the car is, it may be a software option. On the Beemer, I could (if I wanted) stop that from happening. But I don't want to.

My last several cars automatically lock once you get above 15-20mph.

You’re living in the past, Ian!

Modern cars lock themselves, usually at a low speed when first driving away.

The other thing is to avoid known dodgy areas, such as London…

London does seem to be a high crime area with all those ultra low emission zone cameras being vandalised or stolen. :)

Unless I'm being extremely thick, I can't see that either flap has any locking mechanism.

However, I once had a Mondeo, and I recall my panic when I first had to fill it up. Unlike previous cars I'd had, the filler cap had no key, but instead there was a hard-to-find release lever, down on the floor at the right of the drivers' seat. Fortunately, the guy manning the filling station knew where it was.

Our Renault PHEV has a feature that adds a moment of anxiety to every fuel fill. It has some sort of logic to decide whether it wants to open the flap or not; you press the switch, it thinks for a few seconds, and if its checks are OK the flap opens. The handbook says, if it doesn't open, try again, and then if it fails again call Renault.

It has some sort of "fuel vapour management system" that has to sort itself out before you can open it.

nib

OK, maybe not the highest on the planet (South Africa's in with a shout there, I understand), but is there anywhere in Europe with a higher per capita annual number of stabbings than London (particularly Inner London)?

:-)

The first time I filled up a car bought new (which did over 60mpg), I had a similar experience. I had to ring the dealer and speak to the service manager. It turned out that there was a button on the dash which sent a signal to the petrol cap to open itself. The button was in a cluster with the light switches.

One I had, automatically locked the boot if the engine was running - a pain when you'd started the engine to warm it and run the heater, but the ice-scraper was in the boot or you were dropping someone off and had to switch the engine (and the lights with it) off, so that they could grab their bag from the boot.

I'm surprised that there is no locking feature. All the cars that I've had have had locking caps or flaps. The car I built had to have a locking cap to pass the test to put it on the road!

I think the Fiesta claimed that it was only possible to get into the tank with the right-sized tube, exactly the size for (in my case) a diesel nozzle. Even the slightly-smaller unleaded nozzle would not open and go past the flap. It came with a plastic funnel with the right-size tube so that you could fill from a can in an emergency.

That was a 2013.

nib

Neighbours D-I-L managed to scam a motability diesel SUV.

Not long afterwards it conked out. Being a motability car it has priority breakdown/recovery. When the guy turned up it didn't take him long to diagnose that they hadn't filled up the ad-blue tank

Mexico, Honduras, notably the latter.

they don't need to bother with knives because of freely available guns (which would be the weapon of choice in London).

Just where mine is. And the "guy", in most cases these days, is going to be you.

In message snipped-for-privacy@mid.individual.net>, Tim Streater snipped-for-privacy@streater.me.uk> writes

He was not manning the pump. He was the guy on the till, which, even in these days of pay-at-the-pump (which doesn't seem to be as widespread as it was), all filling stations still have.

Yeah, just seen a news article about absolutely blatant ramming cash in transit vans off the road by goons with guns quite literally and killing the driver etc with that being so common that everyone just keeps driving past with maybe a few recording it on their smartphons as they drive past.