£10 for 30 miles??

[patooties]

I’ve just put a tenner (bang on a tenner) worth of unleaded fuel into a 1.5l car. It was reading 55 miles left as I did it - after £10 of fuel it rose to 86miles.

does this sound like the petrol station is stealing - or is that really how many miles a tenner of fuel gets? I don’t have that setting visible on my cars dashboard.

WIBU to go back to them or report them or something?

Sweet baby Jesus. What a plonker. These people really do walk amongst us. I put £25 in my little car and it only half filled it which is disgusting, I dread to think how much the people carrier we used to have would cost to fill now.

if anything it’s your car. And I can drive 10 miles in the city and it seems to gobbles the fuel, drive 50 miles on the motorway and the needle/mileage doesn’t move.

Yeah, not for long though!

I feel like my fuel has been lasting no time too op, for the last 3 to 4 months at least. Same roads I always drive in same way I always drive, they're B roads so not like I'm idling away in traffic, but it goes down in no time, my husband is bored of my going on about theories that the fuel companies are providing substandard fuel or the petrol stations fiddling the amounts to make sure they have some.

That sounds about right. I only ever fill my tank up and it’s now bot far off £100, so yeah a tenner is not going to go far.

I think the "miles left" is partly based on your recent driving, so if you've been doing the sort of driving which uses more fuel (lots of changes of speed, for instance) then it will be lower.
I once had a low tank and made a short local journey. The "miles left" seemed to go down at almost every junction; it had been entirely adequate for the journey when I left, but I began to worry that I might not make it to the petrol station.

Is it a manual ?

The mechanisms for measuring amount of fuel dispensed are very tightly regulated and are regularly tested. The fuel station is not defrauding you. The car dials are not very accurate.

The testing of fuel dispensers is certified when the ambient temperature is 15 degrees. Older pumps may be inaccurate when the temperature is wildly different than this because fuel expands a little when it is hot and contracts a little when it is cold. Many modern pumps use built-in temperature sensors and calculation software to measure the fuel's temperature and adjust the displayed volume back to what it would be at 15°C. This ensures fair energy delivery regardless of weather or time of day.

The flow of fuel into your tank is also affected by how much you are squeezing the trigger - I was told by a car-obsessed colleague, about 20 years ago, that you get best value for money if you don't squeeze it to it's full extent but ease off a fraction. I do not know if this is actually true, but any difference would be of the order of 1% so not really worth being obsessed about.

you’ll look daft if you report it @patooties. £10 wouldn’t even register on mine.
It takes over £90 to fill it up , the mileage left is always wrong. I can drive 26 miles home from work and it can go up.

Fuel gauges should only be considered a guide and range calculators even less accurate.

The needles in a gauge don't move in a linear fashion and the calculations are based on many factors - temperature and how the car has been driven recently ie a gentle run on an A road or thrashed from traffic light to traffic light.

I think it sounds about right. I have a decent SUV of a similar age and do 120 miles every weekend - spend appx £50 on petrol a week, usually get about 30/40 miles left to use in the week.

Reporting them on this evidence would be ridiculous

Yeah doing the calculations mine goes up about 60 miles per tenner when I fill it up.

realistically I do more sometimes.

last trip my car had 120mi left. I did 20 mile round trip followed by 100 mile round trip - and apparently still had 50 mi left.

Topped up fully which cost £78 and I did 600 miles on that tank saying 460 mi of petrol!!!

I don’t find the amount particularly useful in a guesstimate of miles.

For £10 I would expect my fuel tank to have registered 1/8th of petrol being put into the tank

Your till receipt should show how many litres were dispensed, and the cost per litre.

DH and I share a VW Polo. We have different driving styles, and we get vastly differing predictions for remaining driving range.

I saw a fire engine in the Petrol station last night and was wondering how much it would cost to fill it.

My old diesel was about 15p a mile and that was pretty fuel efficient.

This is about 33p per mile.

Either the calc is somewhat off, or you've got a heavy right foot and drive around everywhere in 1st gear, which wouldn't be untypical for the average SUV driver.

Probably a bit of both would close the expectation gap.

The how many miles read out is based by recent fuel economy. If you have been doing a short stop start journey that wiill reflect in a low estimate.

Depends what the cars mpg is. Mine does 39.1 mpg and if fuel is £1.79 approx that would give me 48 miles for £10 of fuel.

I wouldn't report it on the basis of your 'miles left' gauge but if you were really keen you could go back with a petrol can, dispense £10 of fuel into it and then see how much you got.

My miles left thing must be very dodgy as I went from 105 to 63 on a 12 mile journey! I wouldn't trust them to be accurate at all.

I put £10 in my car the other day so I had enough to get me to my preferred petrol station. Before I put it in I was on 25 miles to empty and the indicator was on the last line of the gauge. After I put the £10 in it was still 25 miles to empty and the gauge was still on the last line!

I don't see what that has to do with fuel guage accuracy.

Fuel usage efficiency?

400metres per tank? Jeez.

😂 You'd never be able to get away from the garage!