Oh hell yeah. Went to pick up my ex wife from her waitress job, about 1 AM. Ran out of gas about 3 miles from home. Temp below freezing. She wanted to stop at several people we knew along the way but I was like “No, we will not be bothering people we know due to my stupidity”. We made it OK but it was pretty damn cold out. Pretty damn cold after we got home, too 
My dad ran out of gas with me and my younger sister in the car when I was maybe 10 years old and my sister was 7. To make matters worse, we ran out of gas in the winter in the middle of the night at a very bad location on the highway, just off a bridge. I had to get into the front seat and turn the steering wheel to the left while Dad pushed the car forward and to the left to keep it on the road.
We waited awhile for someone to come help us, to no avail. This was long before cell phones, of course. Finally, the three of us got out of the car and started the long trek to a gas station. Thankfully, we’d gone less than half a mile before two nice ladies stopped for us. Probably taking pity on us because we had my sister with us.
It was a defining moment in my life; the first time I’d ever gotten behind the wheel of a vehicle, and in an emergency situation. To this day I’ve never driven a car. It scares me.
I think I will…
Not participate in this thread.
I now know exactly how accurate my gas gauge is. Last night the needle was not touching E, it was below. After I poured gas in from the pitcher, I drove to the station and put in one gallon. I was tired and just wanted to get home. Today when I went out to fill up, needle was exactly on E.
Now, I vow never to let it get there again, but at least I know, if I am ever in a situation like a few people above, like being stuck in traffic, when to start worrying, or better said, when I don’t have to worry. No need to panic if the needle is touching E. If it gets there stuck on a highway, will pull over and shut off the engine.
Unless it is 20 degrees. Will have to use some gas every now and then so I can run the heater. How much gas does an idling car use?
Sounds like my late wife. When she was a teenager one of her friends was killed in an accident. She never learned to drive but it was OK, when she was 18 she moved from Barrington, RI to Manhattan. Don’t need a car there, in the 14 years I lived there with her, never even considered getting one.
Mr Kramer, is that you?!?
We have it drilled into us from before we get our driver’s licence that you never leave your car when it’s below freezing, especially with no parka, toque or gloves. You get your car off the road, turn on the emergency flashers, and wait.
Mr Kramer, is that you?!?
Is that Kramer in Seinfeld? Anyway, out of context , dude. I said-
Now, I vow never to let it get there again, but at least I know, if I am ever in a situation like a few people above, like being stuck in traffic, when to start worrying
OK, love Seinfeld but never saw that one. I stopped watching for the last couple of seasons when it got wacky. Like Kramer being the Thanksgiving turkey. And Festivus. Hated that, except for the one time when the Mets signed Cespedes, and real life Jerry quipped, “A Cespedes for the rest of us.”
The last time I ran out of gas was maybe a decade ago, give or take. I remember that it was July 5 because the night before, I had debated whether or not I wanted to drive around hunting for a good place to watch fireworks. I am thankful that I chose to just go home instead, because I shudder to imagine in what isolated location I might have otherwise found myself without any gas. As it happened, I nearly made it to the gas station near my place without any issues. I could feel the power steering locking up as I merged into the turning lane. Had the pumps facing the road been unoccupied, I could have slid into one of those spaces before conking out. Instead, I had to put my car into neutral and shove it into position at one of the pumps on the other side.
I remember one time I was coming up to passing the service stop on the motorway when I felt the engine miss a beat (diesel). I decided to turn in (don’t usually buy it in those places as its more expensive) and the engine cut as I was going along the entry road. Had just enough speed to roll slightly uphill to the pump.
Had to turn it over quite a lot to get the air out of the injectors before it fired up after.
I have sympathy for the OP’s situation, even though it was self-inflicted. Even if you are in a jam of your own making, it is a really shitty feeling. Maybe even shittier when you realize it is of your own making.
All this talk of being poor–I can’t compete in the “who is poorest” contest. I have been in situations where money is tight, but I have never been really poor (i.e., can’t pay the rent). But the OP was letting the gas go down to 0 while he was going for “refreshment” at the most expensive place you can buy it, so we can assume that pennies and dimes were not the issue here.
I have run out of gas just once. I was riding a motorcycle on the Pennsylvania turnpike about midnight, gas gauge was on E and the engine sputtered. Time to switch to the reserve tank and then find a gas station. I reach down for the valve–and it was already on reserve. I had forgotten to switch it back the last time I got gas.* After I just stood there on the shoulder staring at my bike, another guy on a big full dresser pulled up. He gave me a ride to the next exit, took me to a gas station, where I fished an empty oil container out of the dumpster to fill with gas. It was not strictly legal but the attendant didn’t know and didn’t care.
*For those not familiar with bikes, on mine there was a “reserve tank” but it’s not exactly a separate tank. It’s a compartment that drains into the tank but there is a valve to close the drain. So when the main tank runs dry, you turn the valve and get another half gallon or so. If you don’t close the valve after you fill up, the reserve tank just drains right along with the main tank. That was in 1983, not sure if that is still the standard design.
Things happen. Sometimes we get ourselves in trouble, and it’s our own dumb fault, and it still stinks.
The closest I have come to the OP’s walk-in-the-cold situation was not caused by gas running out–it was caused by my junker car dying in the parking lot of a Dunkin Donuts in Upstate NY in a very cold January when I was a young fellow. I had a regular winter jacket, but the temp was probably around zero, wind, and it was Sunday night. No cell phones, so no way to call one of my roommates to give me a ride.
That was a very long 4 or 5 mile walk.
As far as actually running out of gas goes, there is no need to be so smug about it–sometimes things are out of our control.
On November 15, 2018 there was a snow storm in the New York area that was notable because nobody had predicted it correctly. They said “We will have a wintery mix” and everyone went to work that morning. I was in meetings at the main office at the far end of Connecticut, and wanted to get a jump on the bad weather, so I left work at 1pm, expecting to be back in Trenton NJ by 4 or 5.
The “wintery mix” turned out to be many inches. The weather was clear until 50 miles from the NY state line. By the time I was in NY state, traffic slowed to barely a walking pace. I passed 3 jacknifed tractor trailers in about a mile.
A few hours later I was in New Jersey and stopped at a rest stop on the Garden State Parkway (the first one you get to in the state) and found everything closed. The snow was a foot deep when I opened the door. I had skipped stopping for dinner and had no water and was super thirsty so I started munching on the clean snow that was accumulating on my car as I drove.
All I could do was continue my way.
Soon I encountered a stunning situation of completely stopped traffic. I would wait half an hour to creep up the next exit, only to find that the new road was even slower. There was a point where I spent an hour to go one city block.
Every few hundred yards there was a car that had slid off the road.
Which brings me to gas consumption. I had a full tank when I left work, but I kept glancing down and watching in horror as the needle kept dropping and dropping with no gas station open or in sight. At one point when I was in Newark, I considered pulling off into some random side street and parking until the next day, using my gas to occasionally warm the car as I slept.
I eventually did find some way to get to the NJ Turnpike and then down to the Trenton area. I set foot in the house well after midnight.
After that day, I realized that it is absolutely possible to run out of gas or be stranded in a car that slid off the road, with no way for help to get to you, even in the most densely crowded state in the union.
The NJ governor took substantial heat about that one. Folks were mad that the state had been totally unprepared, with no salt trucks and no plows out and with no accurate predictions.
ETA: One point to note was that the car was a rental, so even if I had a super survival kit in my own vehicle, it wouldn’t have been in the rental. On the other hand, the rental company only had a huge SUV available when I picked it up–for which I was thankful as I sat in the deepening snow. My own vehicle wouldn’t have done well.
I ran out of gas a couple times. I was a teenager and only put in $10 at a time. That never filled the tank and I pushed my luck too far.
I learned my lesson and now always fill my tank before it drops below 3/4 empty.
Back around 1970, the radiator on my Plymouth Fury station wagon froze at 1AM on a -30F night on the way home from my girlfriend’s parents house. It immediately overheated the engine. Didn’t have on much besides a heavy jacket over my clothes. A guy coming home from a company party picked me up a minute or two later. Back then, you didn’t ever pass up somebody broken down on the road on a cold night like that. Not sure that would happen today.
I had a Kawasaki where the reserve tank was simply a fuel pickup that was lower in the gas tank. The primary fuel pickup was elevated a bit, and the reserve pickup was at the bottom of the tank. That bike would run out of gas at half a tank, because the extra weight of the fuel was needed to get through an aftermarket fuel filter that had been installed. I finally repaired the in-tank fuel screens, and removed the fuel filter, so put the bike back to stock, and it could actually use a whole tank.
Try explaining how you’re out of gas when there is half a tank left.
As one does, I and a pair of Australians I’d just met, rented some scooters one Sunday in Italy to visit the countryside around Florence. One of the Australian’s scooters ran out of gas. We left her on the side of the road, and went to find gas. Everything was closed, but we found a gas station with pumps you could stick Lira into. We just needed something to put the gas in. We found an empty wine bottle in a park nearby.
We were one rag away from a Molotov cocktail, but after not finding anything just rode back with an open wine bottle full of gas between my feet on the floor of the scooter.
We also learned that in Italian “mixa” (or something similar) means gas mixed with oil for a 2-stroke. Poor scooter, never was the same again.
The gas gauge in my stepdaughter’s SUV doesn’t work. So she keeps track of her mileage after the last fill-up to know when to fill up again. Sometimes she cuts it a little too close. A couple of years ago I was working from home on a bitterly cold and windy day when I got a phone call from a number I didn’t recognize, and almost didn’t answer it. It turned out to be my stepdaughter, calling from a co-worker’s phone - they had gone to grab some lunch and were heading back to work when she ran out of gas. She had left her coat and phone at work, but luckily her co-worker had their phone. I had to go out in the nasty weather, go to the gas station to fill up our gas can, and then drive to where she was stopped.
If she’d have had to walk the couple miles back to the nearest gas station in that kind of weather, she’d have been screwed. She said she thought she had enough gas but had forgotten to take into account the gas she used to warm the car up the last few days.
Ah, the venerable petcock! In my racing days, there would be 400 bikes lined up for a dead engine start. Every now and then, the flag would drop and everybody would fire up and take off toward ‘The Bomb’ and one or two guys would make it about 600 yards before the bike died.
I had a sticker on my tank that said “TURN THE GAS ON, DUMMY!”