A sample study of the accuracy of Irish fuel pumps by the AA has some bad news for motorists.
Based on 176 pumps checked as part of a pilot study, the AA technical team found that in 16 per cent of cases the pumps were inaccurate.
In most cases the errors made were in favour of the customer, but there was a substantial number of instances where the driver got less fuel than they paid for.
The AA team surveyed a representative sample of garages countrywide. A mixture of busy and quiet stations were chosen
AA business service manager David Murphy said: “We want to be sure that motorists are not losing out. With prices so high, the Irish motorist wants to be sure that a litre is a litre. Given that a driver doing any sort of higher mileage is likely to be using 3,000 litres of fuel a year, and paying over €5,000 for it, we want to be sure that they are getting a fair deal.”
He added that the scale of the inaccuracies was worrying. “For 16 per cent of pumps to be out by more than the legal tolerance is unacceptable.”