Most Common Side for the Fuel Door

Whether it’s Saturday afternoon at Costco or Friday night before Labor Day weekend, we’ve all seen it.  Massive amounts of gas pump traffic on one side, and virtually no cars on the other side.  In times of great demand, like before a hurricane or incoming meteor strike, the problem is accentuated.  To get to the bottom of this compelling mystery, we did the research to find out which side of the car manufacturers prefer, if any, when they are designing the fuel doors on their vehicles.  

We decided to research all the passenger vehicle models sold in the US (data courtesy of GoodCarBadCar.net in 2020. Ideally, we would have examined the fuel doors of every car on the road today, but we would need to get vehicle registration data for every vehicle from every state. While this data would be pretty interesting, we highly doubt that would be a route worth taking.

With a spreadsheet on one monitor and Google Image Search on the other, we searched each make and model of vehicle and identified which side the fuel door was located.  It would have been boring, but it was absolutely shocking how many hideous looking cars are sold in this country.  This will definitely be a topic for another post.  

The Verdict

We found that 78% of cars sold  in the US in 2020 were sold with the fuel door on the left side of the vehicle.  

From a brand perspective, it was interesting to see how some brands like BMW, Honda, and Audi built all their vehicle with fuel door on a single side, while others such as Mercedes, Chevy, and Jeep really mix it up.  Toyota typically places the gas cap on the left side but uses the right side for some of their rarer models such as the Supra, Land Cruiser, and 86.  And then some cars don’t have a gas door at all, such as the Audi eTron, BMW i3, and the Jaguar i-Pace.   Here are the findings sorted by makes with the most vehicles sold:

“Pro Tip”:  Your Gas Gauge will Point to Fuel Door Side of Your Car

On most vehicles, there is a little arrow next to the gas can icon that points to the left or right depending on where the fuel door is.  From the view of a personal driver, this is a pretty helpful thing to know.  Our job entails us driving client’s personal vehicles for them, so we are required to be able to drive pretty much any vehicle under the sun.  From Bentleys to Delorians to Batmobiles, we’ve driven them all.  And we’ve also put gas in many of these, and the arrow guides the way for us.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for our upcoming (and completely objective) post about "The Ugliest Cars Sold in 2020".