The late Hunter S. Thompson once wrote, “I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio.” While that may be an exaggeration, it brings up an interesting question — how low will you let your fuel needle swing before filling up?
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This edition of Autopian Asks was inspired by David Tracy’s recent tempting of fate, eventually filling the 20-gallon tank of a 2005 Toyota Sienna with 19.5 gallons of gas. Given the all-wheel-drive Sienna’s EPA combined fuel economy figure of 18 mpg, the fuel in the bottom of the tank may have given him a range of nine miles. That’s not much of a margin.
My general rule is to never let the fuel needle swing below a quarter tank, primarily because fuel pump replacement sucks and so long as you keep the pump cooled by fuel, the lifespan of the part should theoretically be prolonged. Given how reliable most modern low-pressure fuel pumps are, keeping a quarter-tank on hand feels a bit superstitious, but I’ve yet to experience any adverse effects of having plenty of fuel remaining.
However, I do have two notable exceptions. If I need to do any work that requires fuel tank removal, I’m running that thing pretty much dry. Draining fuel sucks, and the less to drain, the better. In addition, if I’ve been storing a car with a full tank of stabilized fuel, I let that first tank of the season run down to about an eighth of a tank before filling with fresh stuff, just to get the old but hopefully still good stuff out of the system.
So, how low do you let your gas gauge needle go? Are you one of those people who argues with the range remaining readout once it hits zero, do you take a perhaps overly cautious approach, or are you somewhere in between? Whatever the case, I’d love to know.
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I’m currently trying to run my 95 Ram as close to empty as possible every time. And I’m only filling it up to 1/4 or 1/2. It’s got a leaky fuel filler neck so shorter fill ups prevents me from losing gas. Just trying to get it to a warmer, dryer weekend so I can fix it.
By keeping it near empty I hope it’ll be easy if I end up needing to drop the tank.
When I was a poor broke college student I was always running my car on fumes , And because I was broke, I’d only dispense $5.00 of fuel at a time, Again, because I was broke, and then one day in my Sophomore year of College my car would not start. (ﾉﾟοﾟ)ﾉ
And Guess what? it turns out that my Fuel pump had burned up! Which, If I remember correctly it costs me $800.00 to have repaired, Which only contributed to me being more broke! (｡•́︿•̀｡)
So the moral of the story is: don’t be Penny wise and Pound foolish! (^ see above)
From that point on, after the fuel Pump replacement, I always refueled at 1/4 tank and dispensed $10.00 worth of fuel while in College. Now as an adult I refuel at 1/4 tank and fill tank completely. Life is good! (As I’m no longer broke) ヽ(ヅ)ノ
In most cases: around half tank. Or that’s the intent – my wife sometimes waits until her car is at ~1/4 tank, which annoys me.
That said, on very rare occasions – road trips – I will let it drop to 1/4 tank or below. But those are situations where we’d be driving to my in-laws (first East of Raleigh, then Atlanta, then outside Charlotte; all coming from Michigan) and would make it there on one tank.
I typically fill up somewhere between 1/4 and 1/8th. I’ve gotten down to 0 Miles Till Empty a few times though when trying to stretch out my range. I typically fill up at the same gas station once a week, so the needle really depends on how much driving I’ve done beyond the 60/mile day commute.
In my ’97 Grand Cherokee, I try not to go below 1/4 of a tank, out of concern for both the fuel pump and whatever crud might be in the bottom of that tank after almost 27 years. (I have had it on empty twice – and one time was so empty that the range was reading 0.)
For commuting in other vehicles, I stick to 1/4 of tank out of habit, but if I’m on an interstate road trip and familiar with the number of gas stations in the area, I’ll push it below 1/8 of a tank before stopping.
In the winter, it’s a 1/4 tank. In the summer I’ll let the light come on, then know I’ve got about 20-25 miles before I need to fill up.
On the ‘ol Buick LeSabre, which is designed and built for careless old people, when the gas gauge is 1/4 below the “E” mark, the range on the trip computer goes from “40 miles” to “low fuel level”.
Idiot proof!
That being said, I burn a lot of gas, so for me the idea is to stretch as far as possible in order to reduce the total number of fill-ups.
I also have this thing whereby gas is cheaper near home and near work, but more expensive in between. Like Captain Mancuso said, “The hard part about playing chicken is knowing when to flinch”.
My Focus has that, goes on at 50 miles!
I do really like it, as unlike some other nannies, it’s about something that the car won’t function without.
In my namesake vehicle, I try to keep it full when I know it will be parked for more than a few days because urban legend has it that algae grows in a partially filled diesel tank. The story goes that a full tank has less air, which algae needs to grow. I have no idea if any of that’s true, but I don’t want to find out if it is.
In my DD Kia Rio, I run that down to below empty because even when the needle’s pegged, it still has a gallon in the tank. I go by distance travelled and my schedule rather than the fuel gauge to figure out when to fill.
I generally don’t go below 1/8 of a tank… and it’s not even a car maintenance thing. It’s more a compulsive behavior. The only car I almost ran out of gas in regularly was my 1991 Corvette – it was the first car that gave me the fuel range in miles as a kind of live tally, and the digital fuel gauge was broken into small bars. Both of these made it psychologically easier for me to run it closer to empty, to the point where I once heard it start to choke out on a downhill.
My ’94 Trans Am ran out of gas right after I bought it, but that was only because the fuel gauge was horribly inaccurate, so that doesn’t count.
I mostly try to keep my vehicles more than half full (either by the gauge, if it works reliably, or by mentally maintaining a general sense of usage) but for my SAAB 96 I’ve learned to watch for the needle position a bit below the halfway point that corresponds to a pint of two-stroke oil followed by six gallons of fuel for refilling it, which is a convenient amount to measure.
I once put 26.1 gallons in a 26 gallon tank.
I don’t normally do that, but I am sometimes a cheapskate to a fault and will push a tank to get to a significantly cheaper gas station.
I do the same thing and then immediately think to myself that the stress wasn’t worth the $1.05 I saved.
IIRC, there was something like a 40 or 50 cent/gal difference between the stations I passed up and the one I rolled into on fumes, so it was probably a double digit savings. Worth it? Eh. I didn’t get stranded so I guess it was. 🙂
Also, I think the estimated range was still >0 by the time I got to the station, so I was actually a little surprised it took that much.
I’ll let it get to E. I have a short commute – so short three is no gas station on the way. If I have a day off coming up, I’ll let the low fuel light stay on for a day without sweating it.
When it at the second notch on the dipstick.
For my 350z, I let it go to just above a quarter.
Why? Because a quarter is actually empty. Ask me how I found out…
When I was in high school I couldnt afford gas, but my friends will share their $$$ to put some gas, and drive around the city, going places, dropping them off too. I was always near Empty lol.
Now I fill up every time I hit half a tank or two hours of driving on the highway.
When I was a teenager it was always 5 bucks at a time. Even in a ’70 Newport.
Haha, thanks for bringing up those old memories. My friends and I would do that too, get in someone’s car that was inevitably going to be on E, the passengers would each kick in a few ones for gas and we’d cruise around all night.
Depends on which car. For our occasional-use Abarth, 1/4 or even 1/8 is fine. For our Pacifica hybrid, I like to keep it at > half a tank, both because we regularly take it on long trips, but also because we live in a big earthquake area and we’re counting on it to act as our emergency power supply if we lose power for a long time. [Northridge was 30 years ago, so I worry we are due].
I’m with the 1/4 tank crowd because I drive old cars. Plus, I learned from dragging cars out of backyards that there’s often a bunch of crap near the bottom you don’t want to suck down.
How old does a car have to be for the sediment thing to be real? I’ve changed a few fuel pumps and have never found the tank sediment I had always heard of and was excited to see. Every tank was darn near spotless inside (only about 3 tanks, but each car had well over 100k and was probably 10+ years old, two of them had been sitting un-used for a while).
Pre decent vapor-recovery systems in my experience—or old enough that those hoses disintegrate. I saw lots in the early Super Beetles I rescued for awhile. Often some in my 80s Subarus. A crapload in one 90-something Cabriolet: must have been missing a cap at one point.
-my experience with newer cars is limited
1/4 of a tank or about 100 miles left. . .they are close to the same in my vehicle.
That said, I often cross into NY for work. . .I will often push it to get back to VT for lower prices.
Generally, I’ll fill up the tank as soon as the low level light comes on, or even before, below 1/4.
A long time ago, before mobile data and smartphones were generally available, I’ve miscalculated the range by quite a lot and I ended up doing 40 mph in the breakdown lane with the 4-way flashers on just to make it to the next gas station. The fuel gauge showed 0 for 30 miles or so.
It was a turbodiesel too, and you never want to run out of diesel completely because then the fuel lines need to be bled. But somehow I just barely made it.
I pay attention to the “miles to empty” more than the gauge itself and I don’t worry until I’ve seen that 0 for 10 miles or more. I do tend to keep a full tank, though, thanks to near-weekly Costco runs.
I try not to let mine get too far below an estimated range of 100 miles normally (I live in the middle of nowhere), but I know I can go way lower if I need to. I have my “reserve” light set to go off at 50 miles estimated range, but I know when it says 50 I can realistically go more than 70 without issue at that point, or even more if I switch out of sport mode ;P
I recently forget to get gas on my way back from a work trip… I had just over 100 miles of range before I left, and made the 180 mile trip to my go-to station with ~10 miles left on the estimate when I pulled up to the station.
I use Charles Barkley math for filling up: I fill up at half a tank for $20 so I don’t need to spend $80 on a full tank
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jpxI4YnI4w
On a road trip, never lower than 1/8th of a tank if I can avoid it.
Around town/on my commute, I like to keep one commute round-trip of fuel in the tank at all times, which for me is something in the ballpark of 20 miles to empty – a bit less than a gallon remaining. In the Mustang it throws up a low fuel warning at 50 miles till empty, so I tend to refill the car somewhere in that 50 to 20 miles till empty window.
2 bars. One thing I like about old Priuses is that they have ten digital bars, and each one seems to be about 1 gallon. The interwebs tells it was a 11.9 gallon tank, but I never managed to put in more than ~9.5 gallons, even with a remaining range of 20 miles.
I believe it was the same with my ’06 Civic, though with 12 bars.
Given the wild inconsistency of both the gas gauge and the amount of gas I can put in my Prius (I have one with the stupid bladder tank that hardens with time and temperature and won’t expand all the way anymore) I’m less inclined to push that to the limit. I rarely let mine go below 2 bars anymore either.
I used to run it into the reserve light every time. After experiencing the 2021 freeze in Texas, I keep it on the top half year round.