erhaps you’re your fuel gauge
serves just one purpose – to tell you the quantity of fuel remaining in your
car tank. This is quite vital. But your fuel gauge does just more than that.
Do you recall one common experience
when you enter the filling station to refuel with a new car, a rented car, a
friend’s or relation’s car, or any car unfamiliar to you? You just have to
struggle to find out the side your fuel tank is located – left or right side of
the car. Sometimes you come down to look round the car before realising your
fuel tank side. It could be embarrassing especially when there is queue at the
filling station. Perhaps you have spent some time on the queue only to realise (just
when it is your turn to refill) that you had been on the wrong queue.
Your car designer is
aware of this embarrassment and had given you a quick guide to save you from
it. It is as simple as ABC. Just look at the fuel gauge indicator (fuel pump
icon) on your dashboard and see a “secrete triangular arrow”. The direction
which the triangle points at is the side your fuel tank is located. Arrow
pointing to the left shows the tank is at the left side, and vice versa.
With this knowledge, you
can always tell the side the fuel tank is located any time you hop into any new-to-you car.
WHAT TO DO WHEN YOUR FUEL GAUGE READING GOES CRAZY
The fuel gauge primary role is to let know when
you are running out of gas. In the fuel tank is little float made of foam. The
float bobs on top of the gasoline; the higher the fuel level, the higher it
floats. The float is attached to a thin metal rod that scrapes up against
playing a resistor, which sends an electric signal to the fuel display. The
signal comes from your car's battery via a small coil. The lower the float
drops, the more current the resistor sends to the fuel gauge and the closer you
get to "E" for empty. Of course, today's cars make it even harder to
come up with excuses for running out of gas: The car might turn on a low fuel
light and often an audible signal when you get dangerously low -- or even
estimate how many miles you have to go before walking to work instead of
driving in the comfort of your car.
Gas gauges don't fail often, even if we seldom
trust them. When they do fail, the problem could be in the float and resistor
system located in the tank, in the dash gauge readout or in the wiring between
the two. There are some ways to tell what might be causing the problem: Poor
grounding at the reader in the tank is the most common problem, so it's a good
idea to check wiring first. A needle that remains on empty when you know
there's gas in the tank indicates battery power is not reaching the gauge; you may
need to replace defective wiring between the switch and the gauge. Faulty
wiring often is the problem when the gauge simply reads incorrectly, and the
source varies depending on how the gauge reads versus how much gas is in the
tank
Of course, hybrid and electrical cars may come
with a different kind of gauge -- one that measures the car's battery range --
the equivalent of fuel for those running their cars on electrical power.
Devices in the first generation of these battery gauges were termed
"guessometers" by some owners. It's possible that someday, all
drivers will be watching their battery gauges in real time instead of
estimating when the gas gauge will dip to that anxiety-provoking level. As with
some digital gas gauges that currently give driving range estimates,
electric car gauges do the same with battery charge.
