“If they were going to make a change I’d say they should add tank size and miles per tank. That’s really how the consumer interacts with their gas tank...”
Exactly. I do some driving in Namibia where gas stations can be widely separated and, in some of the areas where I travel, if you run out of gas, you may be well and truly screwed. When I fill up I reset the truck odometer - I really don’t care what the fuel gauge says, as long as it’s not doing something weird (one time I broke the line between the two gas tanks and lost a bunch of fuel, but that’s another story - and don’t get me started on flat tires). Anyway, if I’m randomly traveling and get up to about the 700km mark, I get out the map - I need to know how far I’ve gone and how far it is to someplace with fuel - with a BIG margin of error. Actual cost for gas is about the same as the US, but with the exchange rate a fill-up (150 liters) runs about 900 Namibian Dollars - makes you swallow hard to see the numbers rolling by on the pump.
I remember in my old car which got about 220 city miles and 250 highway on a tank driving to San Francisco on I5, seeing a sign that said the next gas station was the last one for like 240 miles and hoping for nice smooth freeway traffic all the way. Honestly I don’t think I ever knew the MPG of that car, I could have done the math but it didn’t matter, I knew once the trip odometer (my “real” gas gauge just like for you) clicked to 200 I thought about my plans for the next couple of days to decide when I was getting gas.
I do that, too.
A linear gas gauge, it seems, is an unsolved problem in automotive engineering. They always seem to speed up noticeably as they approach empty.
I used to bomb around Kenya with a bitchy girlfriend in a an old Renault 4 that had no gas guage. You would fill the tank and calculate when the next fill-up would be needed and write that number on a pad and keep that pad in the bin under the dash to figure out when you needed to fill up again. Or you could just run into the reserve and turn the stopcock down and you knew you had about 20 miles to go. Not far enough, if you’re out in the bush.
Anyway, once I screwed up and ran the thing out of gas in the middle of a herd of cape buffalo. I reached down to turn the stopcock, and my heart fell to my feet when I found it was already pointing down.
Well, the girlfriend really started letting me have it at this point. Just thinking about it pisses me off, even to this day. After about five minutes of that, I said “to Hell with this”, grabbed the gas can and got out of the car to take my chances with the buffalo. I figured getting trampled to death was better than listening to that...
They’re kinda like bees, right?!? You don’t bother them and they won’t bother you...