Last year the fuel gauge on my car started to act really strange. Sometimes when I turned on the car the indicator wouldn't move at all. It would just sit there pointing to empty like the tank was bone dry or something. If you turned it off and back on, the gauge would jump into action and correctly indicate the fuel level. It's not a really big problem, but it's annoying none the less. I had the car into the dealership to see if they could do anything or knew anything about such a problem - they didn't.

I didn't really want to start replacing parts on the off chance that it might magically start working all the time.  That just seems like a waste. And since the problem was intermittent, it made it harder to know if the last change really made any difference at all.

While talking with a couple co-workers over lunch, we got onto the topic of gas and I mentioned the weird activity that I had been seeing.  One of the guys had actually seen this problem with his friends car.  This is exactly what I was hoping to hear.  The solution was really simple - stop using Shell gas.  Yeah, that's it.  I didn't really think this would make a difference, but I decided I had nothing to lose. So I spent the next month using anything but Shell and while the problem did happen a little.  It didn't happen anywhere near as much.  So I continued the test and now it's been 6 months and the problem hasn’t happened in about 4 months.

I'm not sure what Shell is doing differently than the others, but for some reason it is having a negative reaction with my fuel gauge.  The downside to all this is that I no longer get those reward points for filling up at Shell.  I guess that's a small price to pay for a working gas gauge.