2012 Ford Explorer XLT EcoBoost: Pushin' It

This fascination perplexes me.

Josh has bigger cojones than I do.

I have done a good 7-8 miles once my Mazda 3 hit the 0 miles remaining mark. Still filled about 1.5 gallons short of the manufacturer stated tank size - hell when the gas light flicks on I still have ~3.4 gallons left.

I always run down to E and have never had any fuel system related problems. :)

My experience is different. Ran a car down to E. It really was on E. A friend and I pushed a 5000 pound car, eight miles to the nearest gas station.

I'm not doing that again.

Every night on the traffic I hear about a stall here and a stall there... all creating headaches for everyone else. Knowing modern cars rarely if ever stall I asked a guy who drives a tow truck what the problem usually is.

Out of gas is the answer for about half the "stalls" he deals with.

I think a $500 fine is a good idea for anyone who runs out of gas and blocks traffic.

Maybe it would knock some sense into people.

I noticed during a British Top Gear episode that they said it was illegal to run out on the motorway. Not a bad rule to save us from all these "stalled" cars. It is well known that certain folk will deliberately cruise up and down the local freeway until they run out then blag the free patrol guy into giving them 3-5 gallons.

agentorange, it's illegal to run out of gas in my state. I think they only enforce it on interstate highways, as that's where it causes the most problems.

@brn

Running out of gas on the highway can get you a ticket here in Wisconsin; it means you were unprepared to drive.

Funy how every manufacturer has different 'rules' for their DTE gauge. That must be maddening when you have a whole fleet of different cars to account for.

Ford's seem close to accurate. When you're at 0, it really is darn close to 0 with a small buffer.

Mazda, on the other hand, uses a HUGE buffer comparitively. The DTE gauge in our 6 starts dropping aggressively on it's own toward the end of the range -- far faster than the driving style would indicate it should. The result is that it hits 0 with about 1.85 gallons left in the tank. It's very consistent and I know what's left because I always fill it right back up. 1.85 gallons is exactly 10% of the tank volume, so perhaps that's Mazda's intent. With a typical 24-25 mpg (which is what we get), that would mean you could theoretically go another 45 miles before running completely out. I'm not going to test that, however. I'm content keeping a small volume in the tank so as not to screw up the fuel system. I've run it to 0 a few times just to test it out (usually I gas it up by about 1/4 tank left), but I've never gone more than 2-3 miles past 0.

On a trip a few years back I was out in the middle of no where eastern Washington when I realized I needed fuel. Pulled up closest gas station on my navigation and it was 10 miles further than my Dest till empty, however it made it 8-10 miles past 0 in my 06 Explorer.