Thrill-Seekers Take Note!

There’s a little bit of the thrill-seeker in all of us… some people like roller coasters, some people like bungee jumping, some people like shark diving… and some people like driving their cars when the fuel gauge is pointing directly to that “E.” If you fall into the latter category, we encourage you to find a new hobby because running out of gas, and running on no gas, is really dangerous and bad for your vehicle.

Your fuel gauge is not always accurate. There are some vehicles with electronic readouts that give you an estimate on how many miles you have left in the tank, but even that’s not fully accurate. After you hit empty (or “0 miles until empty”) you could have half a mile or fifty miles left in the tank. You don’t know until you physically run out of fuel. Which is bad! If you’re interested in this, there are plenty of YouTube videos of people testing this out. Just watch them do it and save your own vehicle!

Another thing is that your fuel pump uses gasoline as a coolant, and when there’s no gas to pull in, it uses air instead. Air creates much more friction, and therefore heat, than gas – a perfect recipe for your fuel pump to burn out quickly. This is an expensive repair. A tank of gas is much cheaper.

Finally, every fuel tank has a certain amount of sediment that collects at the bottom. You can’t do anything about it besides just let it be, but when you’re very low on fuel, the fuel-to-sediment ratio gets smaller and smaller and your fuel pump will start pulling in that sediment-filled gas, sending the gunk through your fuel lines and fuel injectors and clogging up the works with great efficiency. If this happens enough, you’ll need a full fuel system flush. We’ll throw this out there again – a tank of gas is much less expensive than that.