…Gas pumps are guessing?

When a gas pump is measuring your gas down to the thousandth of a gallon, are you really getting an accurate assessment of how much is going in?

Short answer: No.

Long answer: No.

As it turns out, gas pumps have an accepted inaccuracy of half a cubic inch, plus half a cubic inch per gallon. That means that if you’re getting 10 gallons of gas, then your gas pump can over- or under-dispense up to five and a half cubic inches of gas and still be compliant.

Five and a half cubic inches of gas is about .024 gallons, or twenty times the accuracy that your pump is claiming, so it’s basically all a lie.

[An Entirely Other Day - Are Gas Pumps Really Accurate To A Thousandth Of A Gallon?]

[Photo Via: _nickd]

Tagged as: Accepted, Accurate, Assessment, Compliant, Gallon, Gas-Pump, Guess, Half-A-Cubic-Inch, Inaccuracy, Lie, Long-Answer, Measure, Over-Dispense, Short-Answer, Thousandth, Under-Dispense