'Just Installed My New Gas Cap With a Key Lock:’ California Man Goes to Fill Up His Tank. Then He Sees What Someone Put in There

"My tío did this to our Cadillac. Engine caught fire."

California man goes to fill up his tank

Photo by: Unsplash.com

Mustafa Gatollari

By: Mustafa Gatollari

Jan 10, at 6:00pm ET

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A Los Angeles man just can’t catch a break with his car. He recently found a substance that definitely doesn't belong on his gas cap.

TikTok creator Alberto Martinez (@thealbertomartinez) says he had a worrying discovery concerning his gas tank. He says that after spending $2,500 to get his car fixed, someone tried to sabotage it.

"OK, I’m making this TikTok because I couldn’t believe it. I walk out to my car because I was heading out to Irvine and then I was driving over … to Riverside to visit my nephew for his birthday," he begins.

"His birthday was yesterday. I haven’t driven my car since New Year’s Eve. I work in downtown LA, and I was trying to put gas, and this is what I found," he continues, before the clip cuts to footage of his car’s gas cap.

He unscrews the cap to show a mound of a brown, granular substance resting in the entryway.

"It’s like candy salt. Someone, someone tried to kill me? Or somebody has beef with me?" he wonders.

Will Sugar in the Gas Tank Damage Your Car?

There’s a longstanding belief that if you pour sugar into someone’s gas tank, it will utterly destroy their vehicle. Legend has it that the sweet, sandy matter cannot be dissolved in gasoline. Instead it coagulates and forms a syrupy and sludgy type substance that clogs the fuel tank, fuel lines, and eventually makes its way to the engine.

This is said to negatively affect engine performance, gumming up the internal workings of your car, making the vehicle impossible to drive. The purported repair involves replacing critical components and potentially the engine itself.

But is it true? Or is the "sugar in the tank" sabotage a myth?

Popular Mechanics delved into the science behind these claims to find if pouring sugar into a gas tank can actually destroy a car. The outlet spoke with Mohammad Fatouraie, an engineering manager at Bosch, which manufactures fuel system parts for a wide array of vehicles. Fatouraie said that Bosch hasn’t "seen an engine damaged or destroyed by sugar in a gas tank."

He added, "Nor [has Bosch] heard of any truly plausible or established cases of this happening."

So it would seem that the sugar in the gas tank sabotage trick is a myth.

Car Filters Take Care of It

Popular Mechanics further explained why a ride’s filtration system is more than equipped to handle the average 200 microns that compose a single sugar crystal.

"Filters in a car’s fuel system capture particles much smaller than that," the outlet states. So if someone did indeed try to wreck a person’s ride by pouring sugar or "candy salt," as Martinez puts it, their plan probably won’t work.

The outlet added that the sheer number of different filters in modern vehicles would catch the particulate matter.

"There’s a … sock-like filter surrounding the fuel pump pickup in the gas tank … in-line fuel filter and the tank pump inlet … filter on the high-pressure fuel pump in the engine bay," Popular Mechanics wrote. It added that "filters at the inlet of each fuel injector" should also prevent small substances from reaching and damaging the engine.

The outlet further reported that sugar would most likely not be an issue for carbureted engines, despite not having "fuel injectors or their individual filters." That’s because there are still enough filtration components that’ll protect the engine from any particulate matter.

Then there’s the matter of physics, Fatouraie told Popular Mechanics. Since sugar is denser than the gasoline in a car’s tank, it’ll more than likely fall to the bottom of the tank. So Martinez would just have to bring his car to a mechanic who would remove the tank and clean it out. If he wanted to exercise even more caution, he could change the sock filter and test the fuel pump. If it’s not operating as it should, it’s a good idea to replace that as well.

But his vehicle’s engine would be just fine. It won’t seize up, nor will it explode.

Commenters Sound Off on Sugar in Man’s Gas Tank

Despite sugar not being a death sentence for car engines, several people who replied to Martinez’s TikTok thought it was.

One person wrote that they saw one of their family’s vehicles go up in flames as a result of some gas tank shenanigans. "My Tío did this to our Cadillac. Engine caught fire. As a kid, no one believed me that I saw my tío creeping around the car at 3 in the morning. Family jealousy," they claimed.

What do you think?

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Someone else offered a helpful solution for anyone worried about people messing with their car’s fuel tank. "That is why I replaced my gas cap with a key lock cuz I didn’t want to have to deal with this. You can’t trust anyone," they said.

Motor1 has reached out to Martinez via TikTok direct message for further comment. This story will be updated if he replies.

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