Here’s a picture of the dashboard on my Mazda 3:
Answer: it points to the side of the car with the gas tank. This has become a standard feature of cars in the past few years, but apparently it’s still unknown to about 90 percent of the population. Not to readers of this blog, though. Now you know!
This may not seem very useful since you probably remember which side of the car your gas tank is on. But back in the day I used to drive a lot of rental cars, and this would have been pretty handy. I never paid attention to the gas tank, and you can’t see them from the side mirror, so about half the time I’d guess wrong and drive into gas stations on the wrong side. Mostly, of course, this was when I was headed back to the airport to turn in the car, and therefore in a little bit of a hurry, which made it all the more annoying.
But no more. No matter what car you’re driving now, you can instantly tell which side the gas tank is on. Progress marches on.
