Fuel gauge playing up

[kaisersolsay]

Anyone had this problem.......

You park the car up and it has 1/4 tank. You get in the car the next morning and the fuel light comes on the needles at the bottom of the gauge and the range is at 0 miles!! I put £10 in her today at my local station as they only has normal 95 unleaded, which would be enough to get to my nearest Shell and the gauge or range didnt move. I managed to drive the 10 miles to the Shell station on 0 miles range and stuck £50 in her and the gauge moved to just below half. On the drive back the gauge moved to just above half.

The annoying 1/4 tank to zero must be a sender fault surely?

Anyone help?

[kaisersolsay]

anyone?

[slimmyreed]

the fuel gremlins strike again. This seems to be a common thing with the 6. If i park up with less than 1/4 tank in the evening, it will certainly be lower in the morning, however in my experience the fuel level will rise again after driving a few miles, but i don't think that happens to everyone.

If you search the forums there are plenty of posts about this, it just seems to be something you have to live with.

[woodlum]

Mines behaves the same below quarter tank level, think they all do that.

I'm used to being disapointed as far as it's concerned with fuel and the 6!

[MartynC]

You get used to it! Mine is just the same as you describe. I don't think the fuel guage is directly connected to the sender unit but is a bit 'predictive' in line with what the system decides, (cold engine, driving style etc). The water tempurature guage is a bit similar, being 'integrated' in some way.

MartynC

[Cornishmoocher]

Mine did this once....

As I live miles away from any garage I always keepa couple of gallons of v-bastard at home.

Got out of the car knowing that I had 30miles in the tank which is plenty to get to the Dick Turpin Megastore, in the morning 0 miles and gauge on <beep>....HMMmm strange, put the couple of gallons in no movement or increase. Got to the garage and filled her up but only got £60 in it! When I got in the car, the gauge only showed 3/4 full too.

So mine was miles out, but has never done it again since. TBH you do get to know by gut feeling how much squirt you "should" have left, and I know that when the DIS says "0" i have got 25 miles of sensible get me to the garage driving.

[andyt]

Mine does this, albeit not quite so severe. I'm not quite sure which is the false reading - whether it's overeading the night before or in the morning it's under. I suspect the latter TBH.

[Shoppinit]

I think the car takes a very smoothed out rolling average. This is so that you don't see the needle moving as you go round bends (or God forbid as you put your foot down!)

When you park the car and start it up again, the average represents the true level in the car. I'm not sure what the fudging going on is. IIRC the value being send to the instrument cluster is in litres, so any fudging is done by the instrument cluster, not the fuel level sender.

Or you can do what I do and never let it get below 1/4 (hurts less filling it up that way).

[spanner1210]

Mine is the same, i found if you sit and let the car idle for five mins the needle will jump up eventually, it just gives you that bit more confidence to actually set off!

Spanner.

[el_ringo]

The Audi programmed the car to be paranoid about running out of juice and the tank is also a funny shape. You easily get over 30mi when the fuel warning comes on. It will only move with a decent dollop of petrol.

[HYFR]

it is quite funny though that you can whack 10 litres into the beast and it wont even register it!

[paul_23]

Mine does this too. I do hundreds of miles on the first half tank (from full) thinking it is really economic, then the last quarter goes in about 50 miles. I know I can only get 280-300 miles on a full tank before refuelling (normally 75-80 litres) so I reset the trip computer and go on this....

[slimmyreed]

Does anyone else find that their range display is REALLY optimistic? When i fill my car my range will always go to around 365 miles, but i rarely get much over 250 miles from a tank.

[bam_bam]

Same over here. However, no matter how much I push on past 'empty', I can never seem to get a £100 fiill up tank. I've done 3 fill ups for £99.76, £99.33 and £99.81. I've nearly had fuel spewing out trying to crack the magic £100and the last fill up was at 124p per litre! Has anyone here filled her up with a £100?... and lets be clear, I'm talking about petrol, not ladies of the night.

[HYFR]

I've done 3 fill ups for £99.76, £99.33 and £99.81

the RS 4 60 litre tank is quite deceiving...as I spend just as much, but it hurts slightly less each time, just more trips to the pumps