I have a 2007 subaru forester. subaru sent me a letter that a 1-way valve needs to be removed from the gas tank. in the letter, subaru recommends having 1/2 a tank or less of gas when getting the vale removed, but does not say this is mandatory. when I took it to the dealer for service, they said the gas tank needs to be less than 1/4 full, and that there was no way to remove the gas so that they could do the service. Is it really true that there is no physical way to get gas out of a gas tank other than by driving the car? Or is the dealer cheap, lazy, or misinformed and gas can actually be removed from a tank by means other than driving. I find it hard to believe that we can remove plaque from the inside of a human blood vessel, but can’t get gas out of a gas tank.
Sure they can do it, but then they have to deal with having gasoline around in their shop, can be dangerous. Just drive until you’re below 1/4.
this is a big dealership, and I was told impossible, not inconvenient. And what if the car could not be driven and I had a mostly full gas tank? this dealership wouldn’t be able to work on the gas tank?
Siphon it out. Just need a place to put it.
If the fuel pump works, then it is easy. Just disconnect the fuel line and manually power the fuel pump and let it pump all the fuel out. If the pump doesn’t work, then it is still possible.
When they said it was “impossible,” what they really meant was "we will not do it."
They thought is was easier/better to lie to you than to tell you the real reasons that they don’t want to do it. On the other side of things, it shouldn’t be so difficult for you to drive around and go back once you are below 1/4 tank.
That big dealership did not want to do it with more than a ? tank. Unless you have a really big problem brining it back when you are down to a ? tank, I would do as they say. It is safer and easier for them to do the work if you do as they say. You really want them to do it that way.
Should they have said inconvenient rather than impossible, sure, but after all it is a car dealer, they are not use to telling the full truth.
Frankly if it were me doing the work, I sure would want less than a ? tank to deal with.
but why would I want to go back to someone who just told me a lie?
As long as your tank fills normally, there is no reason to replace or remove the check valve…You can ignore the recall without the world coming to an end.
With hundreds of cars coming in to have this done, the service department simply does not want to bother messing with draining tanks and greatly increasing the time needed to do the repair. They get paid X dollars to do each car, regardless of time spent on it. Are you beginning to understand?
This is for a recall, unless you have another dealer nearby, you’re stuck with them.
And in the grand scheme of auto repair stories, this is in the ‘little white lie’ category, compared to some of the whoppers we hear about.
p.s. - And here’s another reason they were perfectly fine telling you what they did: as Caddyman said, this recall could result in a large number of cars coming in for the fix. While they might be perfectly able to drain the odd tank of gas every other week, they may NOT be physically able to drain and store the gas from, say, 20 of them in one week. So they didn’t actually lie to you at all, right?