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Ford Designer Credited For Arrow Showing Vehicle’s Fuel Door Location

If you’ve ever driven or owned a vehicle for an extended period of time, chances are that you instinctively know which side has the fuel door. The same probably can’t be said about rental cars or other vehicles you’re not all that familiar with. Thankfully there’s a solution. A car’s fuel gauge, located within the gauge cluster, has an arrow that points to the side where the filler cap is located. The useful and oft-forgotten feature traces its roots back to the Ford Motor Company.

The idea came about in April 1986 after Jim Moylan, an interior trim designer at Ford, struggled to find the fuel cap on a company vehicle he was driving. After a thorough soaking while trying to pump gas on the wrong side of the car in the rain, he drafted a design for the fuel gauge arrow and submitted it to his boss.

Moylan subsequently forgot all about the idea, but some seven months later, his boss replied to let him know that his proposal was approved, and that Ford would start adding fuel filler arrows to its 1989 model year vehicles, which were still under development at the time.

Ford initially rolled out the feature only for new vehicles, but it quickly trickled down to all FoMoCo products. That little arrow is an industry standard at this point, and it’s hard to imagine a vehicle without it, but not everyone knows that it’s there, as the video below shows.

Of course, the humorous clip is an extreme example of how annoying it can be when one doesn’t know which side of the car the fuel door is on. In this case, however, the driver could have saved herself time and plenty of embarrassment had she known about that tiny arrow on the fuel gauge.

To that end, the arrow to help the driver identify which side of the vehicle the fuel door is located wouldn’t be necessary if there was a standardized location for it on all vehicles. Alas, that’s not the case, as the side of the fuel filler varies by automaker and by vehicle.

For instance, many European cars have the fuel door located on the passenger side, while many Japanese and American vehicles have the fuel door on the driver side. Both techniques have valid reasons. European automakers place the fuel filler on the passenger side for the sake of safety when a vehicle has run out of fuel and has pulled off onto the shoulder of the road to fill up from a canister. Meanwhile, American OEMs tend to place the fuel door on the driver side of the vehicle for convenience reasons, so that a driver doesn’t have to walk around the vehicle when filling up at a gas station.

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Comments

  1. In general, the fuel door is located on the opposite side from the hot exhaust pipe. Now many vehicles have dual exhaust but most only have one pipe on either side before splitting into two pipes. Most pickup trucks have a single exhaust pipe that exist the somewhere behind the rear wheels and it will be on the opposite side of the fuel door. With an accidental gas spill, a hot exhaust pipe can ruin your day.

    Reply
  2. Too bad that woman wasn’t filling up at a Safeway. Long hoses.

    The gas filler/exhaust pipe correlation is interesting. My father had a 1966 MG 1100, basically a larger version of the Mini, that took advantage of front-wheel drive to run the exhaust down the middle.

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  3. Never knew! Good read. Thank you.

    Reply
  4. A variation on that theme: the picture of the gas pump pictogram on the gas gauge. If there is no arrow, look to see which side the hose is on, on the pictogram. Left side of the pump = left side of the car, and so on.

    Reply
  5. Very interesting article. I’ve had a few cars where the gas filler was in the middle of bumper,, behind the license plate. Some even had it behind a tail light(’57 Chevy and Caddys). Seems like some ‘vettes had the flip-type cap behind rear window top in middle. Corvair sedans had filler left frt. fender since the tank was in the front. we from Arlington, Tx. 100F degree days for another month or two. Thanks to the ppl who invented a/c!!

    Reply
  6. finding your fuel door is not difficult. its not that hard to walk around your car when you start driving it. people with no intelligence serve no purpose

    Reply

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