Common rail direct fuel injection is a direct fuel injection system for petrol and diesel engines.
On diesel engines, it features a high-pressure (over 1,000 bar or 100 MPa or 15,000 psi) fuel rail feeding individual solenoid valves, as opposed to a low-pressure fuel pump feeding unit injectors (or pump nozzles). Third-generation common rail diesels now feature piezoelectric injectors for increased precision, with fuel pressures up to 3,000 bar (300 MPa; 44,000 psi).
In petrol engines, it is used in Gasoline direct injection (GDI) engine technology.
The common rail system prototype was developed in the late 1960s by Robert Huber of Switzerland and the technology further developed by Dr. Marco Ganser at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, later of Ganser-Hydromag AG (est.1995) in Oberägeri.
The first successful usage in a production vehicle began in Japan by the mid-1990s. Dr. Shohei Itoh and Masahiko Miyaki of the Denso Corporation, a Japanese automotive parts manufacturer, developed the common rail fuel system for heavy duty vehicles and turned it into practical use on their ECD-U2 common-rail system mounted on the Hino Ranger truck and sold for general use in 1995. Denso claims the first commercial high pressure common rail system in 1995.