Finally replaced my old vehicle with a new to me 2013 Murano. It’s got a few more bells & whistles than I’m used to having, including a fuel door that seems to have a mind of its own. Mostly, the door stays discreetly closed, as it should. However, whenever I pull up to the gas pumps at Kroger’s, the fuel door automatically opens itself to allow access to the lid (aka twisty off thing) for fueling. I’ve only fueled the vehicle three times, twice at Kroger where this happened, and once at another place where I do not remember if this happened or not.
Is this supposed to happen?
Has my new to me vehicle been possessed by some unknown entity, benevolent or malign, such that I should retain an exorcist?
As yet, Nissan hasn’t offered an automatic fuel door opener as an option. My guess, speaking as a Nissan Rogue owner, is that either a) the fuel door was never latched and it swung open when you stopped, or 2) that you reached down and pulled the door release lever without remembering it.
I definitely did not hit the lever…it’s in an awkward spot, and would be difficult to hit/pull accidentally. And it is on the driver’s side, so I’d see if it was just randomly flopping open. Going to make a point of checking next time I go somewhere other than Kroger’s.
The fuel intake is always (AFAIK) on the opposite side of where the exhaust pipe is, if it’s a single exhaust. The Rogue, for whatever mechanical design reason, has the exhaust on the driver’s side, hence fuel door on the passenger side.
The Murano has dual exhausts so you can’t win in that respect (carry a fire extinguisher! :D), and the driver’s side is more convenient. Every car I’ve had in recent memory has had the fuel door on the driver’s side. The Tesla has its charging port on the driver’s side where they could have put it anywhere. If I ever had a car with the fuel door on the passenger side I’d be going “WTF?” constantly!
Lots of cars have them on the passenger’s side. Going through the Costco gas station is easier if you can predict where the cars in front of you can go (although the hoses are long enough, most people stick to the more convenient side). But generally speaking, well-established Japanese manufacturers in the US tend to go driver’s side (e.g. Toyota). Nissan and some others (Subaru? I don’t remember?) tend towards passenger side or switch constantly. Although I prefer driver’s side, it’s not a major factor in deciding which car to drive.
My 2014 Pathfinder gave me a fit while I was on a long trip. It doesn’t have a fuel door release. You just push the fuel hatch and it pops open.
Except one time it didn’t.
I stood there for five minutes trying to open it. Finally I unlocked and opened my driver’s door and looked around for a release. Nothing.
With the driver’s door open I walked over and tried the hatch again and IT OPENED!
I thought that it was strange that the driver’s door needed to be open and then I realized that the hatch only opens if the driver’s car door is unlocked.
I rent a fair number of cars, and I’d always have to figure out which side the fuel door was on, then I realized that the gas gauge on almost all cars has a little arrow pointing to which side it is.
Fire risk has nothing to do with it. With single exhausts there’s more room on the non-exhaust side to install the filler neck. Also you can make it a bit shorter, saving a dime or two per car. Woot!
Since Japan is a drive-on-left / RHD country I wonder how much that’s a factor? IOW, is Toyota more US- / export-oriented and Nissan et al, still mostly Japan-centric?
OTOH, I have a Jeep and a BMW. Both hail from purely drive-on-right / LHD countries. Jeep’s fill port is left side, BMW’s is right.
I learned that the hard way too. :smack: I normally don’t lock the car while fueling, but this one time I intended to go inside the store for a bit, had valuables sitting on the seat, etc. So I jumped out, hit the lock button then couldn’t get the fuel door open.
Same way on my 2006 Pathfinder. Here’s a tip, since there is no real way to grab the thing to open it (push on one side and it pivots in/out) it the thing gets frozen stuck with ice you can be in a bit of a bind. I’ve had to go into the gas station/convenience store and get a cup or two of hot water to throw on it to thaw it out.
Granted, that example was a weird case of gas getting in to the cooling vents of a mid-engine sports car, but I once had to get a filler neck replaced because of corrosion which was generating an evap system fault code, and if such corrosion was bad enough, it could leak gas down into the area of the exhaust pipe if it was on the same side.
Yeah, when fuel gets where it doesn’t belong, cars have lots of ways of making the next step pretty spectacular.
Back in college I had a side gig restoring burned-out 1970s era Porsches. They had the early Bosch K-Jetronic fuel injection. Which used fabric-wrapped rubber hoses to carry high pressure (100psi IIRC) fuel all around the engine compartment.
German plastics engineering being what it was (and still mostly is), the rubber embrittled in the high heat, eventually cracking and spraying high pressure fuel all around the engine compartment. Foof!! :eek:
The firewalls were very good in those cars so the cabin and forward usually survived 99% intact. It was pretty easy to replace all the wiring and plastics aft of the firewall, repaint the car, put new tires on it and sell it at a profit over the junkyard scrap price we paid the insurance company for them.
