When I filled my tank last night, it took 13.647 gallons of gas. It’s supposedly a 13.9 gallon tank. Which means I had .253 gallons of gas left. Assuming 20 miles to the gallon, that means I had about five miles left in my tank when I gassed up. That’s the lowest I’ve ever let it get.
What would happen if I ran out of gas? I assume that saying .253 gallons remains isn’t accurate, because I don’t think the engine could suck the whole tank empty. So I probably had less than five miles left.
What happens when you run out of gas? I’ve never run out. And last night would have been a really bad time to do it, too – two o’clock in the morning is a pretty deserted time. So what do you do?
Yeah, I thought about that. But I don’t have AAA (because I’m a liberal), I have Better World Club. Except I just re-upped, and left all my materials at home, including the call-in number. Plus my cell phone is in its orange, splotchy death throes.
I guess you could turn your hazzard lights on and hope an officer or someone stops. I don’t know where you live, but here we have those call boxes on the side of the highways for when your car breaks down.
Get an AAA acount. My car is a piece of crap and I still am getting one, due to recommendations from Dopers. Actually, it’s because it’s a piece of crap I will.
Find out when Highway Patrol runs in your town. In my town, it’s only on weekdays, from 7 AM until 10 AM, and then again from 2 PM to 6 Pm - essentially traffic time. (No, I don’t know what they do the rest of the time).
Make sure you have a cellphone.
Don’t run out of gas! But you can always keep a container in your car. Then hoof it to the nearest gas station, fill up, and walk back. Make sure you have the right equipment to fill it.
I’ve never run out of gas, thankfully, but I’m like Batman - I’m prepared.
I ran out of gas once. I was low, and passed up a station to drive a half-mile or mile to another where I thought the price might be lower. Ran out about halfway between. All of a sudden, the gas pedal just didn’t work, no sputtering or intermittance, just – out.
I coasted to an exit (I wasn’t on an interstate, but this road had the same style of exits onto a smaller road), which luckily ramped DOWN to the other road (rather than up). I coasted down, stopped at the stop sign at the bottom, hopped out and pushed the car into the grass in the middle of the cloverleaf. Then I walked home. It was only a mile or two. My parents (I was 17 or so at the time) drove me to the gas station where we filled a container, then to the car, where we put it in, and I drove to the gas station (like I should have in the first place).
When I worked at a gas station, we had a small gasoline container and a car battery + wires with a handle, either of which you could borrow if you left us your wallet or something. If you’d been in the middle of nowhere… AMA I suppose.
My friend ran out coming down a hill to meet me at a sports centre to play badminton. He called me and I went out to help him push his car through the intersection and around in to the parking lot, then called his parents who came by with a container of gas while we were playing (lucky guy).
We told anyone who razzed us on the way in that that’s how we like to warm up.
Two points of note:
[ol][li]Do not keep a filled container of gasoline in your car. Gasoline is moderately volitile and in time or warm weather it will evaporate and permeate your car trunk and interior, making it more flammible.[/li][li]Make sure the container you carry is for automotive use. I’ve seen a lot of tanks of late that specifically say that they are not for use with passenger vehicles, and to back that up they have an ufcking thing on the end of the spout that makes it on-nigh impossible to get fuel into a car. The ad-hoc solution is to pull out your trusty Benchmade Osborne Axis 940 and cut the damned thing off, but if you are insuffiently equipped then you’d best make certain that your container will, in fact, deliver fuel to your car. [/ol][/li]
Or you can just stand beside the car and bat your blue eyes at passing drivers until some hunky Mel Gibson-clone. If all else fails, you can just give me a call, of course, but I’m notoriously unreliable about checking my cell phone, especially at 2am in the morning.
I ran out of fuel once, thanks to an Og-damned dealer tech who improperly adjusted the gauge. Now I track my milege to make sure that I’m about where I should be. I have a mate, though, that regularly seems to run out of fuel, usually because he’s too busy “doing business” on his cell phone to pay attention to the red flashing light on his console telling him that he’s out of fuel!!!. (Actually, he uses the light as an indicator to tell him when he should start to think about getting fuel; he gets pissed off if he isn’t within 1/4 gallon of empty when he fuels up. Because of this, among other reasons, I refuse to commute with him. Ufcking rocket scientists.)
I have paid for AAA for many years–even when funds were at their lowest–so that I could be sure that I could get my car going if I needed to. It’s generally cheaper to get AAA (or an equivalent service) than it is to pay for a psychic to predict what might go wrong with a vehicle, even if you do regular oil changes, tune-ups, and tank refills.
That said, I have never run out of gas myself (knock on wood). I generally start thinking about getting gas when I hit 1/4 tank. One of my cars even had a broken gas gauge that always showed Empty, so I typically got gas after the trip meter hit 200 miles, so that I was sure I wouldn’t run out. With gas prices the way they are these days, I play things a little closer to the edge, just in case the prices go down before I fill up my 17MPH minivan. (For the record, the minivan is completely paid off, so it would be more expensive to take out a loan on a new car now than it is to drive it around with that low mileage.)
My mother, though, hated to get gas in her car when I was growing up. Back in those days, self-serve was completely unheard of, and gas was astronomically cheap, so I’ve never understood why it was such a hassle for her to buy gas when she needed it. However, I can remember numerous occasions where we literally coasted into the gas station just as the car ran out of gas.
I ran out of petrol once in NZ (owing to a faulty fuel gauge, which insisted I had 1/4 of a tank left!). A Phone call to the AA (Automobile Association, not Alcoholics Anonymous!) and an AA Breakdown Van showed up, pulled a Jerrycan out of the boot, emptied it into the fuel tank, made sure the car was started, and sent me on my way with a wave.
BTW, are there really people in the US who don’t have cellphones/mobile phones? EVERYONE here has one, unless you live in the sticks or you’re really elderly and uncomfortable with anything more technologically advanced than a transistor radio…
Back in when I was in high school (early eighties), I had an old Mustang with an unreliable gas gauge and I frequently ran out of gas. And this was in the days before cell phones so I’d usually wind up hoofing it to a pay phone somewhere and calling a friend or a family member. (one time I was with a friend and I ran out of gas at 2 in the morning. My friend’s mom helped us out and I was so grateful I sent her a thankyou bouquet)
In those days, at the local gas places, you could leave an extra five bucks and borrow their gas can to schlep the gas back to your car. (I eventually bought my own container to avoid the fee. In fact, I still have one in my car but I use it to carry extra water to fill the radiator with.) Nowdays I think a lot of cars have fuel injection and it’s much worse ont he engine to run out of gas. I was told if my current car ran out of gas, I’d have to get it professionally restarted. (don’t’ actually now if that’s true or not)
When I think of all the times I was stranded with that car (out of gas or just a break down) as a young female in the days before cell phone, it’s amazing I actually made it to adulthood. I even wound up hitch-hiking on the interstate once. :eek:
Just wait until you are flying along with your wheels welded down while way out over water and the tank you are about to switch over to seems to have been leaking for a while.
While flying, the only time you have too much fuel is when you are on fire.
While flying the LearStars, converted Hudson bombers, it is wise to carry a 'Vice Grip™ type tool because the fuel valves are on the instrument panel and the blade parts that you use to rotate the valve stems have a nasty habit of breaking off and it is very frustrating to listen to the engines quit while staring at a full fuel tank that you can’t access.
I ran out of gas only once. I didn’t learn to drive until after I was married. In the '60s and '70s men pumped gas.
I left my lying cheating…(oh, not relavant) husband.
About a week after I left, my car stopped…I couldn’t start it… It was almost new…So I called the evil one, err, ex, whose first question was “Have you put gas in it?” Silence.
I’d never put gas in it, ever. I forgot it needed it.
:smack: How dumb was I?
