If my husband were a FReeper (he is...at heart), he would be all over your post. Apparently, yours truly practiced this method of car maintenance "way back when" we were first dating. LOL! He married me anyway.
Trust me, I know. We've been together 20 years... Last week, I took her car to get the yearly inspection and emissions test ... gas tank was empty when I got there. Yeek.
The things I heard growing up with a master mechanic for a father...my two favorites from my childhood in the 70s:
1) A friend's father, a traveling preacher, was driving sixty miles one way each Sunday over the Blue Ridge Mountains to preach at a small church, plus running up a lot of mileage on his mid-70s Toyota Corolla during the week. Now, mid-70s Corollas--mid-70s Toyotas in general, actually--are well-nigh indestructible mechanically; they rust if you look at 'em wrong, but if you keep the rust away, the engines will run forever. Except if you do what this guy did...he never changed his oil. So one day, his oil light came on. He pulled over, dumped three quarts in it, and kept going. It didn't burn any oil...it just hadn't been changed in twenty thousand miles. Thirty minutes after the oil light came on, he was on the side of a mountain highway waiting for the wrecker with a seized engine and an impending $1000+ rebuild bill.
2) A local college professor had my dad do the Virginia state inspection on his newly-restored straight-eight Packard. I mean, this thing was awesome, a real find. (The engine block looked like it was a mile long.) He'd just finished up having someone do a long and involved restoration on the car. The professor then parked the car overnight. With only water in the cooling system. In December. In the Virginia foothills. On a night where the temperature hit about 22 degrees. The poor guy found out the hard way that water does expand when it freezes, with sufficient force to crack an irreplacable engine block.
}:-)4