This is pretty pointless but there may be a factual answer.
Manufacturers now now put a little full pump icon with an arrow on the gauge to tell you which side to face toward the pump. Why the hell would they put the little icon on the right side of the gauge with the arrow pointing to the left side? With my failing eyes, I can see the little fuel pump pretty easily but the arrow can harder to see. I often drive different cars at work and can never remember on which side the fill door is located. Its seems like a dumb layout to me. I’m just sayin’.
I’ve never seen that in the wild. Left is usually a left-pointing arrow on the left of the icon, right is a right-pointing arrow on the right side of the icon.
Wait, are you saying you’ve seen ones where the icon is on the right side but the door is on the left? Because I’ve never seen that. I side the icon is on is the side the door is on. It’s not pointing to say, “go to the opposite side.”
I’m not sure, but I think he means something like this:
The icon itself is towards the right, but the little arrow part of the icon is on its left. IIUC @MikeF is saying his eyes aren’t good enough to see where the little arrow is.
Could be many reasons. One of the likely culprits is parts bin sharing. While a company’s cars will probably have the gas on different sides from model-to-model and year-to-year, they might be reusing gauge cluster parts and designs across the fleet. It’s relatively innocuous to flip an arrow from one side of an icon to the other with an insert, but reorganizing the placement of the indicator entirely is the kind of thing that would make a designer freak out. There’s rarely much of unused space so moving the icon to the opposite side of the gauge stem probably means relocating another thing like a fuel low warning light which has a lot of engineering impact.
My car has a fuel gauge with E on the left and F on the right. It occurred to me awhile back that having the fuel door indicator on the right (even though it points left) made perfect sense. If it was on the left side, it would be behind the fuel gauge needle when the tank is low, which would make it harder to see. Being on the right side, it’s behind the fuel gauge needle when the tank is over half full, when you don’t really need to see it.
Perhaps but having the two icons, each really indicating the same thing, on the wrong side of the gauge just seems like poor graphic design to me. You don’t really need both. The needle, when on (or near) “E” wouldn’t or shouldn’t cover the icons. Thudlow has the right idea but the gauge on this car doesn’t have F & E at 12 & 4 o’clock. More like 9:30 & 3:30. with the icons just to the right of the E. Arrow pointing to the left. Hardly worth bitching about but it was a slow day in the complaint department.
My car has a digital fuel gage that is just a horizontal bar. It’s right in the middle of the instrument cluster.
The low fuel indicator is in the upper left (driver’s side) while the fuel door is on the passenger side.
This discussion reminds me of when I read about an issue relating to Edsel’s taillights. They were shaped somewhat like arrows but pointed inward. When the turn signal was on, their shape implied the car was turning in the opposite direction that the signal indicated.
