Well, tellmei’mnotcrazy’s assessment of the inaccuracy of the stock Ford fuel gauge is sort of correct, you’ve really got to keep an eye on 'em, since they like to fluctuate kind of wildly (this I’ve experienced in two of the Fords I’ve owned, and the four or five I’ve driven as squad cars) and this information I’ve shared with Missus Jockey on more than one occasion, which it appears she has chosen to ignore.
Zette, I’m just trying to get a female perspective on the art of vehicle maintenance, not trying to provoke. And for the record, we’re a spirited pair on a couple of levels, and it’s clear I pushed her buttons, so to speak, but I didn’t think it had reached the level it had.
Chapter 2:
She is still at odds with me on the end result being anywhere close to her fault, so we agreed to disagree (no sense in keeping the fire stoked here).
I broke down and paid (sucker, i know) and got the car back, and told her unequivocally; “If you’re out of gas because YOU forgot to get some, you’ll walk a hundred miles before you call me to bail you out.” She doesn’t agree to that either, but i’ve been keeping an eye on her gas gauge since the incident, and it’s been firmly to the north of 1/2 since she got the car back. So, I think, lesson learned, we’ll wait and see.
Must be an older car thing. That reminds me of the old 1968 Volvo my dad used to own. When he got it as a gift from his father (my grandpa) he was told not to let the gas gauge go below 1/4 tank for the very reason listed in the OP.
As for those problems, cars decay over time. It’s called “entropy”, I believe. If your car is over 30 years old, its service as a daily driver has come to an end.
My Sundance has a speedometer needle that sticks sometimes. I’m sure the nice policeman would be very understanding; “Do you know how fast you were going?”
“Actually, no. My speedometer is broken.” I’m thinking I’m still getting the ticket.
My father ran out of gas this summer. He was driving down the highway when it stalled. We got it towed to the dealers, and when they looked at it, they found that it had ran out of gas, but the gauge was off because a gas company had been putting additives in the gas. The additives seemed to have added up enough to throw the gauge off. The dealer said it was a common problem that they were having. Apparently the gas company was claiming it was the car company’s fault, and the car company was blaming it on the gas company. Mind you, Dad shouldn’t have let the gas get so low.
I’m a woman. I try to not let my car get below a quarter tank, though I have let it get a tiny bit below that when I’ve been making very short-distance trips. I have a Ford Taurus and when I saw that the gas gauge could vary just depending on what incline the car was on, I knew to be careful. My wild guess is that she is (hopefully) just being too damned stubborn to admit she was wrong. I’d also say that she’s not been treating you very well considering that she was expecting to use your vehicle, etc., just because of her pride.
You know what? I’m not trying to provoke, either. I just think that if she SAYS the needle said there was gas, and she’s not generally a liar, it should be believed and dropped. The situation you are referring to has nothing to do with how ladies deal with vehicle maintainence, it has to do with your wife either making a stupid mistake and being ashamed to own up to it, or having a genuine issue with her gas guage and being called a liar. Frankly, if my husband and I were as “spirited” as the two of you when dealing with such minor issues, I wouldn’t admit an error, either. Just my 2 cents, for what it’s worth.
But it seems like SHE was the one who was overly defensive.
SHE was the one who was “verbally spirited” first:
I agree with you on the “she shouldn’t be saying ‘fuck you’ in an argument”, but if you think that buttonjockey has ANY amount of fault in this whole fiasco, well, that’s where I disagree.
She refuses to take ANY responsibility whatsoever. That’s something my KID does.
We drove our 92 Dodge Spirit for 18 months with a non-working gas gauge, using the low fuel warning light to tell us when it was getting low, and never ran out of gas. My excuse was that the non-working bit was at the sensor end inside the tank, and our mechanic warned us that fixing it would involve replacing the entire tank and all the fittings, as due to the general decrepit condition of the tank any work on it would damage it beyond safe use. We managed to put off until the gas line fitting rusted through a couple of weeks ago. I now have to get used to having a gas needle that actually moves!
My father ran out of gas twice under the exact same conditions. Both times I had gone down home (New Brunswick) with him to visit our relatives, and we were returning to Ottawa, driving a rented car (Cadillac the first time, Lincoln Town Car the second - it was a long trip and he wanted to be comfortable). Both cars had what were then new computerised digital gas guages, which not only gave the gas level in litres/gallons, but computed remaining milage for the amount in the tank. He wanted to see how accurate they were in the calculations (answer: not very) and ran out of gas about 20 miles from our destination both times. The second time I got to say “I told you so”.
I call bullshit on all you guys and girls dumping on the wife.
She said the indicator read 1/8 full and the warning light had not come on. Maybe she’s lying, maybe not. No evidence to proove it and many have indicated that Ford’s gas gauges are wildly inaccutate. The poster and all else have assumed that she’s lying. That would be a deal breaker for me in a relationship right off.
By his own words the poster indicated the initial conversation went as follows:
Me: “ugh, Hello”
Her: "yeah, I’m stuck, the car died, i’m not sure where I, uh, yeah, i’m over by that church on the way to the grocery’
Me: “What church? The Warehouse one?”
Her: "No the other one, it just died on me as I was driving, can you come "
Me: “Is there gas in the car?” ( i know she likes to test the limits of the fuel gauge)
Her: “Yeah, there’s an 8th of a tank according to the needle, and the light hasn’t even come on yet”
Me: “Okay, i’m on my way”
Based on that why didn’t the “guy” who knows all bring along a gallon of gas and give it a go? I would certainly try that before allowing my car to be towed especially if I didn’t trust my SO and knew “she likes to test the limits of the fuel gauge”
Maybe Ford should put a warning on their cars indicating their gas gauges are not reliable below 1/4 of a tank.
Bingo- I wasn’t going to come back to this thread and repeat what I said, but you hit the nail right on the head. The whole situation stinks, from the OP assuming his wife was lying, to her acting like a child, to the two of them exchanging “fuck” as part of a “spirited” argument, to the fact that if she was known for running low, why wasn’t that tried first?
By the way, I used to drive a Ford Tauras, and I kid you not, the fuel sensor never worked from day 1. By the time it hit 1/4 tank, you would look as you left the house (at 1/4), then by the time you drove 2 miles you would be at the red empty. You would panic and try to find a gas station, then it would float up to 1/8. Then back to 1/4. It never did that unless it was 1/4 or below. I never, ever knew how much gas it had. A real pain in the ass.
Oh hell no. For one, nobody should be excused from an act of such extreme stupidity as to run the car out of gas by being lied to. For another, she absolutely positively should not ever be allowed to continue in the kind of deliberate stupidity (as she had been previously told that gas guages are not perfectly precise and not to let the gas gauge get that low) by being told an outright lie to spare her precious feelings of being ‘right.’
She was wrong. She behaved like an immature little brat at being told she was wrong. She refuses to accept financial responsibility for the burden her wrongness caused. She does not deserve to get off the hook for it.
I hope you were using some kind of sarcasm I couldn’t detect, because it pisses me off to no end when men say this kind of shit about women and mean it.
Do you honestly think that if buttonjockey was the wife, and the husband had run the car out of gas resulting in an $86 charge to get more gas into it, that it’d be ‘just tell a little lie that something was fixed’ solution to this? Oh hell fucking no. He’d never be allowed to forget how he screwed up. Why do some men and women act this way? Whatever the woman does wrong is excused by the man? I don’t get it.
You have a gift for conciseness that I do not. IOW: Abso-fucking-lutely.
The thing is that she told him that the gas gauge was still at 1/8th of a tank. In his situation, I’m not sure that I would have reacted any differently.
I had a Ford Probe and I had the same problem with the gas gauge when it got past a quarter tank. It would fluctuate depending on whether the car was going downhill, uphill, turning left, right etc. It also felt that it would take a while for the first half of the tank to be emptied, but once it got past the halfway point then it would go much quicker. I just got in the habit of filling it when it got a little past a quarter tank.
My current car has the opposite problem, The needle will be on E and the tank empty light will come on with three gallons left in the tank. With this car, I wait until it gets down to E before I fill it up.
There’s a little thing called a “relationship.” You might want to check into it sometime.
This is obviously a serious point of contention for the OP and his wife, seeing as how it’s been going on now for four days.
In a relationship, sometimes it’s necessary to smile, turn the other cheek, and accept things as they are. Continuing to insist on being “right,” even if you know in your heart of hearts that you are, does nothing but build animosity sometimes.
I tend to agree. However, as others have indicated, maybe she wasn’t wrong. The gas gauge might have read 1/8 tank as she coasted to the side of the road. In that case, from her perspective, she wasn’t wrong. As I said, I’m sure by now, internally, she has accepted that she ran out of gas. But she’s embarrassed at doing so, particularly because they’ve had discussions about it before.
Okay, here comes some sarcasm. I’m identifying it up front, so you’ll know. Ready?
Just to interject a bit of information for those who are still wondering why fuel gages are inaccurate. And this is why the car goes for miles when the gage says “empty”, as well as why it can still read there’s some when you’re out. How Fuel Gages Work
