Placebo Effect? V-Power "Nitro" After 113 Miles

A mute point now his gauge has started to move, but he didn't say his mpg calculations were off, just his fuel gauge.

 

What is your odometer reading?

 

I wouldn't test it - if it's got a glitch, you'll end up on the side of the road with a gauge showing ½, but no petrol for the engine to drink. And possibly big bills for a pump/filter failure. Fill up and see if it goes normally next time. 900 is impossible.

 

If the gauge was proportional, that would be looking like a 1000 mile tank

 

I'd be filling up ASAP (particularly if you're really driving like MadMax) - something isn't computing properly here.

 

Trouble is, if you run out, you could be walking - and paying for repairs.

 

Rather than running until empty, which may require you to get rescued and an expensive repair bill, just fill the tank up again until it stops. Make a note of how much fuel was required to fill the tank. Subtract that from the tank capacity, and you'll safely know how much fuel you had remaining in your tank. You might expect to get 500 miles out of a full tank, so also from the capacity and remaining fuel you can safely calculate the remaining distance you had left.

Sure, if you find you only had a tablespoon of fuel left and your gauge was reading 50% then it's faulty.

I suspect from skimming through the pictures above that the distance travelled on the tank is based on Trip A or Trip B. Perhaps it wasn't manually zeroed after filling, or we're looking at the wrong trip counter.

The fuel guage isn't linear. It falls faster towards the end of the tank, and it only covers (roughly, I'm making these figures up) from the bottom 20% to 80%. That's why you don't see it start to go down immediately, as the guage's 100% is the tank's 80%, and why you can still travel 50 miles when it shows empty, as the guage's 0% is the tank's 20%.

Pixel 2 ?

 

A lot of old gauges readily went past "F" - we never took any notice of the extra - and often would go 100km before it got down to "F". Similarly they'd go below "E" for those game to try, but it often proved expensive.


I think the consensus was that the digital l/100km readout was about 5-10% optimistic compared with calculated. A good guide, though.

@Starship16 - I trust my fuel gauge. I suspect yours met with a glitch with your last refuel. If it does it again, I'd see TOYOTA for a warranty repair.

 

The gauge will probably drop quicker than a ho's knickers when it gets near the end.

 

Don’t think of it as a “gas gauge” but as a “guess gauge”.

Others above covered the reasons, but just be glad you don’t have a Gen2 .

The gas tank bladder can be a bit finicky .

 

Great improvement not having that bladder anymore...

 

That got me reading:

'Moot point' - the meaning and origin of this phrase