Argh. It happened again today: I pulled into the gas station, but all the cars at all the pumps had gas caps on the driver’s side. My car is one of the makes that has the gas cap on the passenger side. There wasn’t a place I could wait (in my vehicle) without blocking traffic entering the station, and no other gas stations around (rural area). Is there a logical argument for placing the gas cap on the passenger’s side (which seems more awkward)? Why aren’t all of them on the same side, thereby making for much better traffic flow at gas stations? If it’s a matter of where the gas tank is located, then the question is still fundamentally the same: why not locate the gas tank on the driver’s side?
Because it hasn’t been considered an important enough issue to legislate a mandatory side. And as long as nobody is forcing it through legislation, the thousands of auto-makers aren’t all going to independently decide to do it the same way.
You can pull up close to the pump, and not worry if there’s enough room to open the door and get out.
Sounds good to me (mine’s on the right), but you still need to leave enough room on that side to open the gas cap and operate the pump.
I wouldn’t care which side the gas cap is on if all cars had them on the same side, so you didn’t have to be face-to-face with another car that had its gas cap on the other side of the car.
This woman would probably agree with you.
Once upon a time, hoses were long enough to reach the other side of the car.
You’ll notice that for most cars, the gas cap is on the opposite side of the car than the exhaust. I’m not sure if that’s for safety or other design reasons, but depending on the engine layout it may be optimal for the gas filler tube to be on one side or the other of individual models.
Though there is a connection between the exhaust pipe and the gas cap, I’m not sure that’s the real answer.
Note that any car that has a lever to open the gas cap will have the gas cap on the driver’s side. This makes for a shorter cable and a straight cable path.
So, if you want to give the driver the ability to open the gas cap from inside the car (and thus be able to unlock the gas cap without a key), you put the gas cap on the driver’s side. Then you design the exhaust to go to the other side.
At some other once upon a time, cars had them smack in the middle of the back end. I’ve owned five cars (two Chevys, one Ford Maverick, a Cadillac, and a Studebaker) that were that way. The GM cars had the gas cap hidden under the license plate.
I can see how an inside release would make a left side filler easier.
The gas cap on my car has a power lock that is unlocked and locked along with the car doors using the remote, or the lock button inside the car. It is on the right side.
This is not true for my VW Jetta. I believe that all VW’s have their gas caps on the passenger side. And all of the ones I know about have a remote opener at the driver’s seat.
What’s wrong with being face-to-face with another car?
It wouldn’t make for unidirectional traffic flow through the service station, for a start. Someone’s going to have to reverse to get out, which has to be less safe that everyone driving through in the same direction.
Rather than mandating all fillers on the one side, “they” should maybe have rules to ensure a roughly even left/right distribution between makers/models. Then you can have cars using both sides of a pump “island”, which should be a more efficient use of service station real estate.
I do miss my old car with the filler behind the licence plate though. It liked it both ways. How anxious are people who fret about which side the filler cap is on their car though?
American and Japanese cars usually have the gas cap on the left. German cars have them on the right.
There’s a theory that cars have their gas cap on the opposite side of the car from the side of the road they drive on. That way, you’ll pull into a gas pump on the right side, your gas cap is right there next to the pump.
Germans, the theory goes, use to drive on the left, but changed after World War II. However, they kept their gas caps on the right side of the car because they were use to that.
The problem with the theory is that it doesn’t explain Japanese cars. Japanese drive on the left, but their gas cap (at least in the U.S.) is on the left side.
Then again, I remember seeing something about Germany mandating gas caps on the right. The idea is if you ran out of gas and had to fill up your car on the side of the road, having the gas cap on the right would mean you could safely do fill up the tank without being in the stream of traffic.
I also remember the big pre-1976 GM cars having the gas cap under the license plate, so you could fill up the car from either side.
That will never happen, unless we mandate not only standard gas cap locations but also single-entrance gas stations.
Costco use single entrance stations and it works very well. Well, except in Oregon where gas station attendants are required by law and they are exceedingly slow.
How does it work, then, given that the gas caps aren’t uniform? Is entering traffic divided by which side of the pump they want to pull up to? Does nobody try to turn around when there are four cars lined up on one side and nobody on the other?
The majority of service stations here in Sydney are only meant to be driven through from the one direction. It’s usually the same direction as the flow of traffic on the near side of the road that the facility faces. You go in the first driveway, past the pumps, and out the second. If the cars are of a more or less 50/50 left/right split for provisioning, and you have island pumps that face both sides, everyone has a pretty equal shot at getting alongside one. Be a bit of a bummer if you lived in a suburb with a statistical blip one way or the other (too many Mercs or something).
I recall hearing that the pump nozzle on the little picture of a pump, next to the fuel gauge, was supposed to be on the same side as the filler cap, so that you could get in any car and know which side you needed to have the pump on to fill up. If that’s not true, it should be.
Costco’s hoses are long enough and start up high enough that they will reach across the car to the far side.
As needscoffee said, and to elaborate: At Costco the lines at the gas pumps are often so long that you get into whatever line is a little shorter than the others, regardless of whatever side of the pump it’s on. If it ends up on the “wrong” side of your car you just pull the hose over your car. It’s long enough.