If there’s one car fact or Easter Egg or detail (or whatever you want to call it) that seems to delight non-car-obsessed people more than any other one, I think it has to be this one: fuel gauges tend to have a little arrow on them that points to what side the fuel filler is on.
People absolutely love this little detail, and they’re right to do so! It’s really a design triumph, a tiny bit of extra graphics on a dashboard that makes life quantifiably better. And it was the idea of one man, a man named Jim Moylan, and I’m sad to inform you that Mr. Moylan passed away on December 11, at the age of 80.
Moylan was a senior interior designer in the Plastics, Paint, and Vinyl division at Ford, and once, when he was borrowing a car to go from one building to another for a meeting in 1986 on a miserable, rainy day, he had to put some gas in the car. So he stopped at a gas station.
As Moylan explained to the Every Little Thing podcast in 2018, an episode which, by the way, I was a guest on and helped the hosts find out who was responsible for the little fuel gauge arrow, this is what happened:
“I had to go to a meeting in another building on a rainy day. When I went to get the pool car, I started it and noticed the gas gauge was empty. I pulled up to the gas pump on the wrong side, so I had to move it.”
Moylan, wet and irritated, decided to make it his mission to prevent humanity from having to deal with such an indignity ever again. He took action:
“I got back to my office after the meeting, and without even taking my coat off, I sat down and started writing the first draft of this proposal. I typed it up and turned it in and forgot completely about it.”
Here’s what that memo looked like:
…and if you want to hear Moylan tell you the story himself, here’s the whole episode:
You may notice that in Moylan’s tidy little sketch on the memo, he doesn’t suggest an arrow; rather, he has a little overhead view of a car, with a tiny little fuel door open:
During the design process, this seems to have been decided to be too complicated, and when Ford started producing cars with Moylan’s clever idea, it had been simplified to the arrow we all know. Here’s a dash cluster from a 1989 Thunderbird:
When it comes to a ratio of simplicity to benefit, Moylan’s arrow may be one of the best automotive innovations ever. It’s a little thing, sure, but a very clever and useful little thing, and I hope Moylan was proud of his achievement. I’m sure there’s so much else he’ll be remembered for by the people who knew him, but I think this is a pretty big deal.
While I believe that Moylan came up with this idea independently and Ford was the first to widely deploy it, I also think the concept pre-dates Moylan’s wet fill-up by about a decade or so. That’s because it seems that Mercedes-Benz utilized a very similar concept, executed in a different manner, on the fuel gauges for their W123-series cars, built between 1975 and 1986.
On the W123 fuel gauges, there was a small red low-fuel warning light set into the gauge. This light was shaped like a triangle/arrowhead, an arrowhead that pointed to the right, where the car’s fuel filler was.
I think this is deliberate; Mercedes-Benz wasn’t in the habit of making warning lights triangular at random. Here’s an earlier fuel gauge with another style of integrated low-fuel warning light, one that is decidedly non-directional:
I think the design of the arrowhead low-fuel light, pointing to the side where you refuel, was intentional.
I should mention I did talk about this on that same 2018 podcast, where the hosts of the show reached out to Mercedes-Benz, only to find they had no idea about this and no formal records of its design – so, I think the credit should still go to Moylan, who has documentation and proof of intent.
So, rest in peace, Mr.Moylan. You made a small but important difference in so many people’s lives.
Top graphic image: Vermeulen-Sajewski Funeral Home
Did WSJ rip this off?
https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/ford-gas-arrow-inventor-jim-moylan-6b2ef066?mod=business_feat4_autos_pos4
Just because:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vupgBykQnko
This was a great and easily-implemented improvement.
I will note, though, that many fuel station hoses can reach the far side of the vehicle even if parked on the wrong side.
I will also opine that all fuel fillers should be on the driver’s side of the vehicle. Why? Because winters and rain happen all over the place, so having it closer to the driver makes it less impactful to the driver to refuel. I believe it’s also safer as the driver then only has to walk a few feet instead of all the way around to the opposite side, and since the vehicle is parked alongside the pump, the driver doesn’t walk into the driving lane to enter/exit the vehicle. Some will make the argument that having it on the passenger side makes it safer because on the rare circumstance when they have to refuel on the side of the road the person doing the refueling is no longer on the traffic side of the vehicle – which is generally true – but I submit that if the fueling was less inconvenient in the first place they would be much less likely to run out of fuel in the first place.
How do you design for cars sold in different markets where they might drive on opposite sides of the road then? the driver’s side is not universal everywhere
RHD cars would have the fuel filler stamped and the underbody components reconfigured for the other side. Or we make LHD universal (it’s already the vast majority anyway, and places have switched sides before). Or – the cheap way – make sure drivers know the fuel filler hose can reach the other side of the car.
My 2007 Focus had the filler on the passenger side. My 2014 Fiesta had it on the driver side. Did not seem to be a uniform design at Ford, let alone all domestic makes collectively. Current Subaru is in the passenger side. I wish the little arrow was a bit larger, but glad it is there. The gentleman’s grave stone should have a little arrow engraved on it as well, pointing straight up to heaven.
As someone who has to fuel AND charge a zillion different cars all the dang time, this guy is an absolute hero. The ol’ domestic/European/Japanese rule isn’t that reliable anymore, especially with EVs in the mix. Most of the EVs I’ve tested—at least the ones with semi-sane UIs—adopted the little arrows, too!
For the most part, the you’re-a-peein’s get this right, though: if you’ve got a passenger, put it on their side and make them deal with this crap.
As a person who was a Field Service Engineer, constantly renting different cars, this made filling the car up before returning it, much easier.
Mercedes may have done it on one car, but he requested Ford adopt it to the whole fleet, and for that he should have the accolade. I wouldn’t be surprised if Ford had a set of factory LTD Crown Victorias in their motor pool, those were left hand fillers while most Fords I can think of in the 80s (Escort, Taurus, Grenada, Fox cars) were all right hand doors.
Mercedes not only had that feature on the W123s, but also the R107s and W116s.
Because – guess what – MB used the same triple-gauge (Fuel/Temp/Oil) dial across all car lines in the 70’s.
And they did the same w/ the W126 & W124
I wonder how that would work on old Jaguars. Two arrows? I remember a friend who had borrowed her family’s jaguar and went to put gas in it and was surprised that the fuel tank was full, but the gas gauge said that it was empty.
Some friends of my parents had a Jag and put premium in the left tank and regular in the right. Premium was for going uphill and driving in traffic, but regular was for cross-country cruising where the throttle was barely open.
I had no idea!! Did the driver have to switch tanks and keep track of two fuel levels?
Growing up we had a motor home with two tanks.
When the 1st tank was really low, a low fuel light would come on the dash and dad would rotate a switch to change to the other tank.
Funny enough I don’t recall if there was a low fuel light for the second tank, though I’m sure there had to be
In the late 60s early 70s my parents had an International Harvester Travelall and it had dual tanks. I was about 5 years old so I didn’t know to ask the question 😉
This is the kind of content I depend on The Autopian for
This might be unpopular, but I’ve been 100% indifferent to these since I first had someone point them out to me in the early 2000s (not a single one of our cars ever had them in the 80s or 90s). I guess “just having to know” was a pretty simple part of car ownership — and in some cases, you’d just memorize shortcuts for unfamiliar cars: Domestic, driver’s side; European, pax side; Japanese, usually driver.
And just to underscore my indifference, those are pretty lame arrows. My new-to-me X3 has TWO of them in the fuel cluster for some reason. Probably a running change that ended up being redundant.
You know another fuel feature I find useless? “Miles to empty.” It seems like a great idea, but if you think about it, it’s really condescending to our math skills (why not show “true gallons to empty” or “reserve gallons remaining”?). And it also tends to be inaccurate due to a built-in reserve capacity, so once you realize that zero isn’t really zero, you’re just going to Kramer the car as long as you’re comfortable.
Hi! I was the designer responsible for the fuel level gauge for four different OEM fuel tanks.
I wouldn’t trust the fuel gauge to be even remotely accurate at low readings. The tolerance on the bent steel float arm is enough to be half a gallon out all by itself. Once it’s assembled in to a tank and maybe bent a bit during assembly it’s anyones guess how much fuel is left.
The car doesn’t have the data required to be accurate.
Miles to empty is particularly useless though, because whatever data it uses as a prediction is entirely invalid because normal humans change how they drive when the warning light comes on.
I tried to upvote this twice.* Thank you for spreading good information back into the world, and with the expertise and experience to back it up.
*Yes, really, Autopian has some colorblind accessibility issues they still haven’t fixed
Night Panel mode could make us all equal – the like counter gets a bit brighter when hovered over but doesn’t change color after being clicked… unless my color vision’s not as accurate as I think.
On the main topic, and also Night Panel-adjacent (Black Panel, back then), my Saab 900 once cheerfully informed me that I had another 20 miles of range and then ran out of gas three miles from town. I assume it was still “thinking” optimistically since a good portion of that tank was less-hilly highway driving, since it usually seemed accurate-to-conservative as one would expect, and the gauge itself was reading where it should have been.
I’ve been critical of domestic fuel gauges forever. GM, in particular had the “perceived fuel economy” gauge that hung out at full (or even above full), for the first 100 miles, then would plummet like a rock over the 3rd one hundred miles.
Going from my Impala to my E93, was a revelation. Early on, I wanted to make it to my favorite gas station and watched the DTE display like a hawk. I arrived at the pump with the display reading 8 miles to empty. I put 15.7 gallons into the 16 gallon tank. Made a believer out of me.
Meanwhile my Fit says 50 miles and it’s 100.
The BMW continues to be pretty darned accurate for fuel consumption readouts, the VW & the Ford are quite pessimistic. The most I’ve put into the 36 gallon tank of the ford was 31 gallons. At California gas prices, that produces an eye-watering total at the pump. The VW is a little better. I have put 13.1 gallons into the 13.5 gallon tank. That got me 420 miles and I was sweating making it to the station.
Don’t get me wrong. I prefer knowing it’s inaccurate to my advantage. I can never get more than 7.5 gallons in my 10 gallon tank no matter what the computer says. That equates to 70 miles in my car on a bad day. Anxious me approves 😉
Two of my German friends have told me about how their fathers would deliberately run a new car out of gas to check the gas gauge. One even took it back to the dealer because it went an extra dozen kilometers on empty which was obviously defective.
Actually my mom did that too come to think of it, but I think that had more to do with her Scotts heritage (as long as we’re indulging in ethnic stereotypes) and having a gas pump at home.
Ha, liked for the Kramer reference.
1 time in college I kept putting off filling up my car (and 84 GTI at the time), and when I finally realized just how low it was the ‘last time’ driving it bf needing to fill it up, the engine literally sputtered, I engaged the clutch as the engine shut off. Fortunately there was a gas ststion w/in sight and I was able to coast it the last couple hundred feet in to an available pump.
It definitely was one of those smile and shake my head at my dumb luck kind of moments
“Clark, isn’t this the gas tank?”
“Yes, I know honey. Get back in the car, just fixing the license plate here.”
Somehow our Subaru Ascent has what looks like two different indicators, one printed on the cluster and one in the center LCD screen.
They each point different directions. Thanks, Subaru.
It had dreams of being a pre Ford Jaguar.
That sounds like typical Subaru.
Sometimes the smallest ideas can make the biggest impacts! R.I.P. Mr. Moylan
I’d also say credit to Moylan/Ford is more apt because the Mercedes approach, while helpful, is far less obvious. An arrow on its own just isn’t as clear as the arrow+icon combo.