cars with fuel cap release levers which a) are impossible to reach while seated but require you to open the door and/or contort yourself to reach the damn thing, and b) are located so near the hood release that you pull the wrong one.
Inconsistent gas tank location. The vast majority are on the left. Just enough are on the right (I’m looking at YOU, Subaru!) that it leads to unnecessary confusion and traffic flow issues at gas stations. I suspect that at this point, it’s atubbornness on the part of the auto manucturers, refusing to follow an arbitrary standard just to make lives easier.
ETA: Yep, I’ve vented about the fuel release before.
If you ever run out of gas on the highway and have to pull over onto the shoulder and refill from a gas can, it’s much more convenient to have the gas tank on the right.
Allegedly, if you look at the fuel indicator on the dash, the fuel icon has an indicator (often a small triangle/arrowhead) pointing to the side the tank is on.
I learnt this on the SMDB, and holds true for my car and a few hired cars I have driven.
I, on the other hand, keep reading about that and no vehicle I have owned has the little arrow. Maybe it’s on fleet vehicles but I haven’t rented a car in decades.
I’ve read that having an approximately 50-50 mix of left and right actually leads to the best traffic flow at gas stations.
In any event, any given person mostly only drives one or occasionally two cars. It’s not like it’s hard to learn which side your own specific car is on.
This article says the fuel gauge pointer was first implemented in 1989 Ford cars, and “slowly proliferated into other companies’ products until they finally became ubiquitous in recent years.” It’s been quite some time since I’ve seen a car that doesn’t have them, although apparently there are cars that instead of an arrow, just put the fuel icon on the appropriate side of the gauge (fuel icon on the left side of the gauge means fill on the left side of the car and vice versa).
I’ve had rental cars on business trips where I had to hunt around for the fuel cap release lever. I remember one of my very first business trips when I was just out of college and asking another customer for assistance in finding the thing.
That happened to me in Portland as I was fueling up the car before returning it to the rental spot at the airport. At the time, Oregon did not allow self-service at gas stations, so the attendant was quite annoyed with me while I searched. I finally figured out that the mat beneath my feet had slid over and covered the little lever.
For at least some brands of cars there is no lever or button in the cockpit. You just push in on the fuel door outside and, like a flush-doored kitchen cabinet, it unlatches and pops back open.
It also locks when the car is locked and unlocks when the car unlocks.
Until about a month ago, all the cars I’d ever owned had gas tanks that did not lock: you just flip open the door and unscrew the cap. I suppose that doesn’t offer any protection against someone siphoning out your gas or putting foreign substances in your tank, but I never worried about that and it never happened to me or anyone I heard about.
When my brother and I were teens a guy backed out of a parking space into my mother’s car putting a big dent in the rear fender. After a lot of arguing he gave her his name and an insurance company. On calling the company our father found that they had comprehensive insurance on the guy’s car but no liability insurance, something I’ve never seen or heard of since.
My father called the number and got a lot of denials and ‘whattaya gonna do about it?’ Giving up, he put in a claim on our insurance and they paid fix the dent. They might or might not have extracted it from the guy afterward; I never found out. Either way this offended my brother and my sense of justice ao we drove by the address and got the make and model of the car sitting in the driveway. We bought a locking gas cap and gave it to the guy, even stopping by at two in the morning to install it for him.
This discussion of gas caps reminded me of an incredibly stupid product design on the gas cap of a Pontiac Montana we owned about 20 years ago. Great minivan, but had an extremely annoying gas cap. It had a sensor that told you if it hadn’t been tightened enough to ‘lock’ it, but if you turned it too far, it triggered the Check Engine light on the dash. And I never could figure out how to turn that light off except to take it to the dealer where we purchased the car. They never charged us for that service, thank goodness.
Depending on how old those cars are, there may have been an automatic lock connected to the rest of the door locks. Did you ever try to open the gas door while all the passenger doors were locked? Back in the day before central electric door locking good bet the gas door was totally unsecured. After that, you’d never know unless you tried.
