I got a lotta cars, and only one of them has the DTE display. I’ve had it down below 10 and never run it out of gas. In fact, I’ll fire it up, hit the road, climb the hill, then at cruising speed, sometimes the figure will go up.
The e30’s cruise control will shut off and not work with the tank dangerously low. I like that!
All the others seem to read low, and the needle will go well beyond empty with plenty of miles to go. One of the Ford trucks has dual tanks, and I’ll purposely run one dry, then switch. Otherwise, I’d be leaving 5 gallons in it every fill-up. That’s another 40 miles down the road I could have gotten!
I like to keep 'er topped off, and rarely let it get below 1/3 full.
My car is old enough, it doesn’t have a range calculator. It does have a “nearly empty” warning chime and light, which I have hit upon occasion. I do not like that feeling!
For me the filling up point depends very much on what the current price trends are in my area (and/or nationally). When they are going up, I top off frequently. When dropping, I will usually let it get pretty low before I go in, and then only put a few gallons in. The 3rd cheapest station in the county is not that far from my house/work, and is close to the gym I frequent.
I am not sure I am following some of the logic in this thread. Filling up more often doesn’t really cost you anything more in total or at least it doesn’t for me. I rarely let my vehicles get below 1/4 of a tank. The reason is that I go to convenience stores with good gas prices most days to get something else and I can just automatically fill it while I am inside. The total added time is probably less than a minute because I am inside while it is filling up.
I have ridden with people that like to play games with low gas and it makes no sense to me. It is just added stress and worry for no benefit. My ex-wife was the worst. She once had a Volkswagen Jetta with a faulty gas gauge. It would run out right at 1/4 of a tank and she did it so many times that I lost count and blamed it on the gas gauge every single time. I lost my shit after about the 5th phone call to come pick her up and get some gas even though it was running out on the exact same place on the gauge every single time. That is what you call selective mental retardation but she never did get it. The gauge said she still had some left so it had to be there despite all evidence to the contrary.
I life to have enough gas at all times to get somewhere pretty far away if a nuclear war breaks out or even if one of my kids has an emergency. It is just a simple precaution.
My Dad never let his tank go below half and he instilled a sense of dread in me when I see that. I’m not as bad as that. I let mine go to 3/4 but to me 3/4 feels like E and I have to fill.
Wait, your car hits “E” first before the light comes on? All the vehicles I’ve owned have been the other way around.
Anyhow, to specifically answer the OP (minus my previous post) I generally only start to fleetingly think about refilling at the 1/4 tank mark, and usually refill more like at a point between E and 1/8 if I’m just driving around the city. (Remember, my car has a HUGE cushion). On the highway, where gas stations may be more infrequent, 1/4 tank is my point where I start looking for the next gas station.
I’ve never in my life run out of gas in any vehicle.
My car’s counter goes down to zero, and it still runs. I tend it to let it go very low, because I stockpile my supermarket gas points for as long as possible, in order to buy a full tank super-cheap.
Depending on where I am, for example driving across Nevada, I might even keep it over half. Otherwise I’ll let it get pretty low because I have other things to do with my time.
I fill up a little below the 1/2 mark, which is once every 8-10 days–go Prius! I do that because I sometimes have long drives with little notice. Also, I do yoga while filling, so I’m going to fewer yoga sessions, saving both time and money. If I filled up more often, I’d be making money.
It’s not exactly the same thing. I know there’s a gas station half a mile from my house at the bottom of a hill. If I wait until I’ve got 5 miles left, I’m comfortable with that. As I said earlier, when circumstances are not as certain (like a long distance over desert drive) I will carry a lot more fuel (and water for that matter).
Now I’d like to hear from a pilot. As I understand it, they do calculate amount of fuel they need to carry based on load, route, weather, wind, and a host of other factors. I don’t believe they’re in the business of adding on a bunch of extra fuel - in the realm of the 50% or higher I’m seeing in this thread - especially not over land.
Top Gear did a challenge a few years ago where they raced from Basel to Blackpool on one tank of fuel each. The cars were a Subaru Legacy, a VW Polo, and a Jaguar XJ. In each car, the range computer hit 0 miles before they got to Blackpool but none of them actually ran out of fuel and they made it just fine. Jeremy Clarkson actually drove wastefully most of the way on purpose (speeding, A/C and seat heaters on, etc.) and discovered afterwards when the crew examined the tank that despite the range computer saying 0 for awhile before he arrived in Blackpool, there was actually enough fuel in the tank to go another 120 miles.
So I don’t think it’s so accurate. I used to fill up obsessively between 1/4 and 1/2 tank, but now I let it go until the light comes on.
A lot of them do. True engine failures are rare but fuel exhaustion is a very common cause of small plane accidents and every one of them is senseless. My cousin runs a helicopter touring company in Colorado and he very generously offered to take my daughters and I on a quick 10 minute flight for free (operating costs of the helicopter alone are about $700 an hour). I noticed immediately from the front seat that he had basically no fuel and pointed that out. He said that he had to run it that way because of payload considerations.
Fair enough as long as everything goes right. However, SUV’s and pickup trucks can be loaded with all the fuel you want with only a minuscule decrease in gas mileage. Fuel weight isn’t a significant factor at all for American style vehicles especially once you get up to speed. Inertia works both ways. Even 18 wheelers get decent gas mileage considering the size and weight of the load that they are carrying.
You aren’t saving much of anything by running your tank almost dry on a 3,000+ plus pound vehicle with a 15 gallon gas tank. I don’t track my expenses down to the cent level. I prefer knowing that I can get where I need to go on demand without trying to track down an open gas station.
OP spends a lot of time driving for work. It’s not futile to budget your time carefully when working, especially if you earn an hourly rate. Saved time at work then directly equates to more leisure time.
But you are replying to the wrong person. My post was disputing the OP’s claim that worrying about a few minutes of his time for gas fill-ups was worthwhile. OP had added up a few minutes per fill-up over the course of many years and come up with a “cost of time” of several thousand dollars. I was making the point that this did not give a good sense for how much time was really being “wasted”. So I used a similar hourly rate to the OP to show that even if you value your time at $50 an hour, fill-up strategy only makes a difference equivalent to a few cents a gallon.
