I almost ran out of gas!!!

Good story, and glad to see people still help eachother out.

 

And you did this with two children in the car? Nobody gives a crap how much gas you think you had or how much you could squeeze into the tank afterwards: you were a dangerous idiot, and a damned lucky one. Never presume to guess how far you can drive after the last bar starts to flash.

 

I have often gone over 30 miles after the last bar starts to flash on my 2005. Never run out of gas. Just saying, not recommending.

 

Judgementalism is a disease that seems to run in my family. Possibly you are similarly afflicted? I try to avoid being judgemental.

In case I was unclear, I presumed how far I could drive from the time the second to last bar went out, not from the time the last bar started to flash.

One always has to make choices of how timid and cautious to be in life. Living with a vehicle with a lesser range, getting fill-ups a higher priced tourist trap locations, is a fairly small cost, but still a cost that I need to evaluate and understand. To take a more extreme example, I once has a car develop a hole at the bottom of the gas tank. Clearly it would be nice to have a totally separate fuel reserve, but the cost and safety of keeping some extra sort of tank, not too mention the problem of gasoline going stale over months, means I'm unlikely to implement that level of caution. I expect the result of this, for me, will be to "back off" one level of fuel gauge bar, thinking of the second to last bar as my last 50 miles.

Being an infrequent reader of priuschat, and even less frequent poster, I may have written too much in a single posting. One thing I'd like to elaborate on, that I only touched upon, was a question of how much fuel consumption characterization information the computer stores. As always, I pressed "reset" at my last fill-up, and so the 49.4 MPG figure showing at out-of-gas was probably reflecting only that tank. I'm sure some of the earlier non-highway, non-air-conditioning driving skewed things. Might the computer have been programmed to regard the last few hours of high speed, airconditioned driving I was doing as an aberration, like going up a hill, and so it failed to rapidly diminish the MPG average, and turn off fuel gauge dots? The engineering term for this is a "low pass filter." And might the filter extend for more than just the current tank-full? In the prior couple of tanks, I had been doing a great deal of low speed, non-airconditioned driving, with very good ~55 MPG mileage.

Somewhere, I thought I'd read that the prius computer "learned" the owner's driving style over time, using that to manage various subtle functions. If so, changes in winter-summer fuel mix, and the other changes might cause various things, including reported MPG to be less reliable shortly after transitions? That's just speculation, but nothing completely explains away the contradictions I noted in my previous posting. (Specifically, why 3 previous start-of-flashing, last bar fill-ups, of 10 to 10 and a half gallons, in an 11.9 gallon tank, falsely suggested that there would be well over 1 gallon left, "below" the gauge, IN ADDITION to the last bar lasting 23 or 24 miles, rather than double that.)

 

On a blinking pip, I'll go no more than 20 miles if at all possible. The farthest I've gone out of necessity, is 40 miles. Your results WILL vary.

.

 

I always think I'll learn something when I come to PriusChat. I had to read your message a few times but I finally got it: If you have nothing good to say, say nothing!

 

fdf: i am glad to hear you were able to run into a wonderful human being and that everything worked out so well.

imho; i dont think you took an unnecessary risk although i might have been tempted to slow down a bit when the last bar disappeared so rapidly, but in your situation, i would have done the exact same thing and i question some of the responses some have given you here.

i have FREQUENTLY gone 3- FIVE times farther than you have on my last blinking bar, including the tank that is currently in my signature. on it, i went nearly 100 miles after the last pip started blinking and i sincerely doubt that i was driving on fumes. (fillup was under 11 gallons or so... heck dont remember so will have to post to check my sig and edit!!)

granted, its a 2010, but have done the same thing several times on my 2006...i dont know why it happens, but i get my blinking bar usually at 400-475 miles or so and i never do less than 500 miles. now that summer is here, i wont do less than 600 miles on a tank unless i am filling up for a trip or something.

i live in Olympia, 6 weeks ago, i left Olympia with 2 bars, started blinking just south of Chehalis, continued on another 100 miles and filled up in Salem OR simply because gas was 10 cents per gallon cheaper and i am a tight wad...

am i pathetic or what??...well ya of course i am!! who else wanders around the house turning off lights after my family?? i cant let it go... its a waste and it irritates me like none other@!

so do i think you took a risk?? nope i dont. i kinda wonder what would have happened if you would have let the car sit 20 minutes and then try a restart. i bet it would have started up and ran until you hit the gas station.

the only other thing i would say to you; next time you run out of gas, shut down immediately. running your traction battery down that low is a no-no.


**edit** as promised. i went 576.6 miles and got 53.3 mpg which is 10.8 gallons. so bet i could have done another 50 miles EASY!!

i think this may illustrate another benefit of tracking tank mileage. with your car and my 2006 the bladder causes erratic fillups and i have had times when i knew that i would be getting a bit of a short tank when my "pump" mileage was significantly higher than the computer mileage which usually meant the tank was not filled to its normal level.

 

I have run out of gas 7 miles after it started to blink. (once) I now regard the last pip as too low and try never to let it blink again. YMMV

 

Thanks DaveinOlyWA!
I posted my experience, not because I was looking for a critique of my "risky" decisions. (I actually think that, in general, I'd have lived a richer life if I'd been less timid, not more timid, but of course these things are hard to evaluate.) I thought I might learn something about my prius, and help keep others from experiencing a similar problem.

Lots of people have also reprted a 10.x gallon fill-up, from last bar blinking. I've thought that represented a "capacity minus 1 gallon" or even "capacity minus 2 gallons," equalled 1 to 2 gallons left, after the gauge read empty, and this sometimes might be true. But, due to the accordion bladder fuel tank, even when it's warm, that may not be the case. Had I know this, that there was not even one pint left below the gauge, I'd have gotten gas at the earlier less convenient location, and I hope I would have thought to slow down and turned off the air conditioner compressor. (not the fan and opened windows, since open windows cause drag.)

As I said, it was about 10 miles from start of last bar blinking to empty. Had I reduced my speed to 45 or 50, I think I might have increased my mileage 20%, 30%, maybe 40%, giving me an extra 2, 3, or possibly 4 miles. Still not the additional 7 miles I would have needed, but a possibly manageable walk, had we ended up walking. (Of course some people might condemn someone for driving 45, on a road with a posted speed limit of 75....)

Since I've been driving for over 30 years without running out of gas, I think it's not unreasonable to think of this as a once in a lifetime occurrence, but hey, things happen, and you deal with it. I think it was one of the BookTV lectures I was watching a few months ago--can't remember the author or the book--where a thesis was being argued that people are universally much worse than they think in their ability to predict the future, but universally much better than they would have thought in dealing with a difficult future. This was partly about being able to predict the ups and downs of the stock market and money, but also about career and life problems in general.

 

maybe we are completely missing the point. maybe what you really needed was a reconfirmation of the goodness of the human spirit. maybe, car problems of one type or antoher was inevitable and u were simply going to meet your good samaritan one way or the other and running out of gas was simply a convenient way of doing so

 

I ran out of gas for the first (and last) time in my 2006 two days ago while I was taking it to the dealer as a trade-in for a new 2010.

I made it quite a way after the last pip began blinking, nearly fifty miles, and at a speed of around 70 mph, too.

I was nearly to the dealer's exit when the dash lights lit up. I knew immediately what it was but had no idea how fast I could go on battery alone and didn't want to chance depleting the battery entirely. Fortunately, I had already begun to slow for the exit so as I was mostly coasting, anyway, it wasn't an issue.

I got onto the side street and silently limped up to a gas station without any drama. The dealer was less than a block away so I put in exactly one dollar's worth of gas (a little over a third of a gallon). To my relief, it was enough to get the ICE to run. I still had the dreaded 'warning triangle of death' and the check engine light, but with the ICE back in operation, I simply drove the last 300 feet or so to the dealer.

I stopped to get some things out and when I started back up, the ICE was still running and the 'triangle of death' was out, but I still had the check engine light.

As we finalized my deal, I explained to the salesman what had happened. He was interested only to the extent that he had been told in training 'never' let a Prius run out of gas. I explained to him that it was likely due to the strong possibility of someone continuing to drive on battery alone until it was completely depleted, too, which would likely cause severe battery damage.

I hadn't come anywhere close to that as I still had at least four bars of battery power left by the time I made it to the gas station. I really only drove on battery alone for a couple of hundred feet, and then only at low speed.

I told the salesman that once the tank was filled (apparently with at least three gallons), the check engine light should go out.

I don't plan on taking that kind of chance again with my new 2010 (until maybe when it comes time to trade that one in...).

 

ok I'll bite:

Uhh... why not just put in some gas? And why not just put in a few bucks instead of 1 dollar.

Why run your Prius dry, even when (or especially when) you are about to take it into the dealer for a trade?

I guess it is nice to know that IF I ever run out of gas I can coast along with battery power for a while. But I will probably only ever do that if there is a world catastrophe and i am running from the shockwave of a meteor strike or a nuclear detonation. In which case it won't matter if I mess up the car engine, because I would be minutes/hours/days away from certain death anyway.

 

You're right: what was I so upset about? After all they're not *my* children. Carry on, fdf.

 

My new car hadn't yet arrived at the dealership but the deal for it had been finalized a couple of days prior. So, I guess you could say my old car was a rental until my new car came in. But it was a rental where I wouldn't be penalized for bringing it back with less than a full tank of gas (or, in my case, nearly bone dry).

I was curious how far I could get on the last blinking pip and thought if there were ever a time to take a chance, this was it. It was a Seinfeld episode sort of thing, I guess.

I should probably also mention that the dealership was two hours away. So I already had put a couple of bucks worth of gas in, trying to estimate just enough to get to the dealership.

As it was, they didn't even look at or move my old car from the spot I left it when I pulled in. It's not like I was trying to pull anything over on them. I told them what had happened and no one seemed to mind. All they did was take my old keys, transferred the old license plate to the new car, gave me the keys to my new car, and I left.

That was kind of the point of running my old car dry. I don't make a habit of running the fuel tank down to the blinking pip, but when I do, I quickly find a station to fill up. Since the car was essentially owned by the dealership at that point, I figured, "What the hell?" and gave it a shot.

If I knew I was too far away to get to a gas station without depleting the battery to the point of damaging it when it ran out of gas, I would have just stopped, called and had them come get me with a can of gas.

I guess the bottom line is to avoid running the fuel tank down to the blinking pip but, if you do, find a gas station, post haste. I estimate I had a little less than a gallon of fuel left when it started blinking, but I'd sure never count on it.

 

Yeah, my brothers and I drove one of those. We checked the gas level by lowering a jack handle into the tank. Once you ran out of gas you turned a lever inside the car which allowed you to drain a few more precious drops of gas into the engine. We ran out of gas a lot as teenagers. Good times!

 

I ran mine about 10 miles past blinking the other day and added 11.052 gallons. Leads me to believe AT BEST ...I have about a gallon when the blinking starts. I have decided that blinking means ....get gas. No reason to push it ...although it is in my very nature to push it