Yesterday, I get in the car and the check engine light is on. Well, crap. I take a look in the owner’s manual to see if there’s anything I can check myself before I take in to the shop. It says to make sure the gas cap is screwed on tight.
I check the gas cap, and it’s completely gone.
It was attached to the car with a little plastic tether. Looking at the spot where the tether attached to the car, it looks like someone just grabbed it and yanked hard enough to snap it off. It wasn’t all that strong of a tether. It was only intended to keep dumbasses like me from losing the damn thing. They didn’t make it strong enough to withstand someone trying to pull it off, because seriously, who steals a gas cap? Someone walking through my neighborhood Wednesday night, apparently.
The gas level was the same as it was when I parked it, so whoever took it wasn’t after gas. I guess they just had a desperate need for a round piece of plastic. :dubious:
Someone did the exact same thing to me too, down to breaking the tether. (I was the only person driving the car, so I know it wasn’t that the tether had broken earlier and been forgotten while filling the car up.) Considering where I lived, I figured someone was just doing stupid vandalism, or they were too cheap/lazy to buy a new gas cap before their scheduled emissions test and mine was possibly close enough to work.
This was before my emissions testing time, so I went to an auto parts store and bought a new one, and the guy testing my car asked if I’d failed a previous test when he noted the shiny new gas cap. I told him no, someone had stolen it and fortunately I noticed before going for the test.
On BBC years ago, they were interviewing some British Mafiosi who said that with the gas cap it was easy to get a duplicate key from any dealer. That seemed so outlandish that I have remembered it ever since.
I didn’t get my gas cap stolen, but I did replace it with a locking gas cap for a while, when gas was up around $4.00/gallon.
One thing that I found was that every few weeks the Check Engine light would come on because the locking caps apparently don’t give the same seal as the factory caps.
A couple of years ago, when we drove out to the west coast and back, we made a gas fillup stop somewhere in rural Montana. After leaving the gas cap on the trunk while I filled (like I always do) I (you can see this coming) drove away without replacing it - somewhere in rural Montana there’s a gas cap for a car that isn’t even on the road any more (got in an accident 6 months later). Never really worried about the reprocussions of it since, the only thing that changed was that I’m more careful to remember to replace the gas cap when I fill.
Having done this often enough to warrant a :smack:, I now put the gas cap on the windshield wiper, figuring I’ll see it before I drive off. Oddly, I have not yet gotten in the car to see it on the windshield; I seem to always remember to put it back on, now.
If you were a less ethical person than you are, you might have decided to replace your lost gas cap by stealing somebody else’s.
That seems suspicious to me. Does the gas cap have the VIN on it somewhere? If it does, why? If it doesn’t, how do they tell it from the gas cap for any other car of the same make, model, and year? For that matter, I wouldn’t be surprised if one gas cap would fit several models.
I leave the gas cap on the trunk of our car and then drive off, freak out when the engine light come on, drive to the gargage where my friendly mechanic (who knows of my affliction), heads right to the source of the problem and puts me on a new one.:smack:
Some gas caps are unlocked by a key. If it’s the original gas cap that came with the car, then I’m guessing that a key that unlocked it would also start the ignition.
A lot of the older ones could be forced by jamming a screwdriver in and twisting hard, and the lock cylinder usually had a code stamped on the side to make it easier to order replacement keys, so I was told by my old gaffer anyway.
Although why you’d go to the trouble of taking the petrol cap, to get a key made, to come back and steal the car when the door and ignition locks would (presumably) have the same mechanism as the cap escapes me.
Yeah, I gotta agree that I bet they just needed one for whatever reason and took yours. A pretty crappy thing to do, but I’ve certainly heard people talk about that before.