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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Totally in David’s corner. Of course my normal commute is short and has a gas station on almost every corner, but if there is more than 1 gallon left in the tank when I filly it, I feel shame. (er, unless there’s a storm a’ coming FL)
I usually fill up at about 1/2 to 3/8 tank — for two reasons.
1) I live out in the boonies where gas stations are far apart.
2) My gauge drops faster the emptier the tank gets, so a quarter tank can turn into nothing rather quickly.
Go much below 1/4 in the winter (where they have winter as opposed to a chilly fall) and you’ll freeze the waterpump solid.
Dunno, this seems more like an urban myth, speaking a someone who used to live in Detroit and Boston, and on the edge.
Grew up in Ohio and currently live in Wisconsin. Can confirm this is a myth. Never in my 30+ years of driving on E has the pump frozen.
This happened to a girl friend’s sister in Boston. It is not a myth
I think the main issue is using a water pump to pump fuel.
1/4 on both my car and Motorhome. I’m anal and like to avoid any stress that I can. Yes, I’m the guy that gets to the airport at least 3 hours before the flight time.
I usually fill up about 1/4 tank.
Back as a teenager, I decided to drive my Tercel wagon up the logging roads behind our house, the tank was around 1/4. Once I was on a steep incline, it starved the engine of fuel. I tried turning around by rolling backwards, but was too close to the edge to have a safe margin. So ended up having to walk back down the road about 5 miles to get cell coverage. Mom wasn’t happy about that call, LOL.
The gas tank in my ’71 Fiat 500 holds 5 gallons and will take me almost 250 miles. The gauge does not work so I have a calibrated ruler next to the tank in the frunk. This works out great since I just dip the tank every time I get groceries. If I am going for a long drive I will check before I leave and fill up using my lawnmower gas can.
It depends on what trips I forsee. I try to time fill-ups with either grocery trips or trips an hour north (where gas can be up to a dollar cheaper).
But in general about 1/4-1/8 tank. If I’m trying to meet people somewhere where I might need gas on the way I try to fill up to the top the day before because I am awful at being on time to stuff.
I don’t even know if the low-fuel light works. A quarter tank for me is empty.. I hate not having gas in my car. Makes me nervous. Also, every time I need to get somewhere in a hurry I need to stop for gas, so I try and get it done early and often! Especially in the winter when it sucks to fill up.
I pretty much do the same as you Thomas, but occasionally see the fuel light because life. One time while towing my old bigger camper, I was getting significantly worse fuel mileage that I realized, and I ended up putting 24.6 gallons into my 25 gallon tank. With the mileage I was getting that day, I had maybe 4 miles of range left.
I actually considered going for the next exit, which was the one we usually got off at. Thankfully my buddy was there to slap some sense into me.
I fill up on Mondays. Its a chance to step out of the office for a while. Tank is around half empty at that point. When I’m on a road trip, I tend to take enough breaks that it doesn’t get very low. When I was younger? That needle is well below E before putting twenty bucks in there.
I’m a tank is mostly full kinda guy.
My wife’s policy is to somehow get me to use her car (send me to buy pads or something) when the gas gauge gets below 1/4, and then I will fill it up for her.
’21 Sonata N Line – I drive a lot but fairly consistent each week, averaging just over 20k miles per year on this car alone (extra 3-4k miles on my wife’s). If I see 80-90 miles of range I rarely hesitate to fill up before setting out on a roundtrip 65-70 mile commute. It doesn’t always work out like that but typically between 20 – 80 miles left is usually when I go.
I oddly don’t drive directly past many gas stations but there is always one no more than single digit miles away. If it is Monday and I am down to 60-70 miles of range, I typically chance it knowing I will get a nice full tank and get to use my Shell points and T Mobile Tuesday money off. Yeah, I am a cheap skate working hard to save an extra $0.15-$0.25 per gallon. Never had a problem running down low in a tank like this in multiple cars over the years.
I usually wait until the range is around 30-40 miles. I figure that gives me some margin for error.
I start to plan to stop at 1/4 tank.
If you are driving and I see your gas light come on and you pass more than 3 gas stations, I will have a stroke.
My wife will go until the computer says <10 miles left. I’ve lost years of life from panicking about her gas tank.
I’ve bet against that computer many times, hitting “—” on the interstate with the a/c off, ready to throw it in neutral. So far I’ve somehow come out ahead.
I have two examples, both of which are due in part to the vehicles’ own idiosyncracies:
My Toyota truck started having trouble with its fuel gauge in the 90s. It’d read low, then go high in right turns. Then after a year or so it’d read dead empty when only 1/4 tank of fuel had been burned and no amount of right turns made any difference. By this time I was completely aware of how far the truck would go in any season, and not only that but the Empty warning light still worked. So the needle would drop right to the peg and I’d keep driving. Once the light came on and stayed on, I had about 20 miles’ worth of fuel left, and I’d find a station. This was 100% reliable and I never ran out of gas. I finally replaced the sender – and the tank – last summer and now the gauge works again, after about 28 years of not worrying about what it showed.
On the other hand, during the pandemic my wife became paranoid of ever running out of fuel – how this related to the pandemic, I don’t fully understand but in the interest of domestic tranquility, I didn’t question it. So she didn’t ever want the tank of our second-gen Prius to go more than 200 miles before filling it up.
I’m not sure if the second-gen Prius has a learning algorithm or something similar in its fuel gauge display, but after a couple of years of using only 200 miles’ worth of fuel, now the Prius shows dead empty and blinking the last pip on the gauge by the time it’s gone through 300 miles. And knowing the vehicle has an 11.9 gallon tank, even on its very worst tank average of 40mpg, I know it’ll go an easy 450 before I have to seriously start looking for a pump. I’ve been trying to push it to go farther and now it seems to be comfortable going 300-350 miles, but it’s still overly conservative. Driving around with the last-drop marker blinking is nothing new to me, but I know what the car can do and how big the tank is, and actually running dry has never been an actual risk.
So in both cases, I am perfectly comfortable (or was, in the case of the truck) with the needle resting firmly on the peg. Not a problem.
I almost never let it get low enough to be notified that I’m low on gas. Once in a blue moon I learn if a car has a low gas light.
100% I think I saw the light once in the WRX, driving back from San Diego to Phoenix, I miss judged the distance to Tonapah. That was a bit of a white knuckle ride. I generally get gas on a schedule, like every other Friday kind of thing. I have never understood the logic of running to empty.
I am of the same chaotic energy that feeds David Tracy. I paid for the whole gas tank, I’m going to use the whole gas tank!
Because of this, I can confirm that a Smart Fortwo will go 35 miles past the fuel gauge reading 0.0 gallons remaining. Yeah, the final gallon of readable fuel is given a countdown. After that (depending on model year, anyway), you have another 1.3 gallons in the tank. You really don’t want to use it because the fuel pump sits in that extra 1.3, but you can use it if you need to.
Edit: Surprisingly, I’ve never run out of fuel before. Running that Smart 35 miles past 0.0 was the closest I’ve ever come to running out, and it was because I left my wallet at home, so I had no way to pay for fuel. I have run out of charge in an EV just once…stupid winter.
On road trips I gas up every 2 hours or so. Both for bladder reasons and I have driven over 95 miles in Wyoming without seeing a gas station.
Yep. Driving the remote roads of Nevada and Utah on a road trip in winter, I’d fill up at pretty much every station I passed, which wasn’t many.
It depends on whether or not I have a good relationship with the car. If I love it and baby it, I will wait until about 1/8 full before I refill.
On the other hand, if I don’t like the car, and it’s left me stranded before because of various sundry weak-assed failures, I’ll sometimes underfill it on purpose, just to hear the wheezing cough of a death rattle as it sputters out.
Gives me a certain satisfaction.
And those kind of cars I always have extra fluids and a gas can in the car anyway.
Does this make me morally bankrupt? Evil? Just mean?
I dunno. But it’s how I do things.
I gas up between 1/4 tank and the low fuel light going on.
Funny story. 30 years ago I was driving my now wife’s car. I told her I gassed up because the low fuel light came on. She did not know it had one because she grew up in rural North Dakota where running out of gas in the winter can mean death. She never went below a 1/4 tank but She does now we live in a more civilized place.
I go by odometer mileage, not fuel indicator. The size of my tank multiplied by average fuel consumption sets my target. Usually aim to refuel with two gallons remaining. Never have run out of fuel 50 + years of driving.
Ahhh. Nomen est omen.
True to my stone age name, indeed.
I am only on 39 years of driving and only ran out at a gas pump or two in college.
Normal day to day 1/4. Traveling try to fill up are 3/4 to avoid every one stopping at the same station.
I’m definitely more conservative with fuel these days. I tend to keep it above 1/4, if not usually full.
19.5 gallons of gas in a 20-gallon tank? Autopian? More like Amateuropian.
My ’97 Econoline had a 33-gallon tank. The needle was hugging empty and I was climbing up a steep hill, hoping to get to my destination first, but it started up-shifting because it couldn’t maintain the fuel flow.
I turned around and made it to the gas station at the bottom of the hill without the engine turning off, where I put in 33.1 gallons. I still have a picture of the fuel station when it showed that.
and I bet all 33 gallons cost you $25.
$87. That was in 2018. Wasn’t even the most expensive fuel-up I’d ever done, since I was the driver for a small band in 2014 when local gas exceeded $4/gallon. At that point I had a few fill-ups over $100.
I remember being annoyed whenever I had to put in more than 20 gallons, because my grocery reward points only applied to the first 20. So it’d run to 20 gallons, then the pump would stop and I’d have to do a separate transaction to get it the rest of the way, then add the quantities together to compute my MPG.
As close to E as I am to BJ’s. I time my commute to hit BJ’s up on the way home. I am pretty good at estimating if I can make it one more day.
Usually I will go to a bit under a quarter of a tank unless I am on a long trip. My wife, though, doesn’t begin to think about refilling the tank until the light comes on.