£37 for covering 164 miles?

[Cable]

I can get 100miles to £10 with motorway driving with the 16v 

[Nino]

In my golf i filled my tank and only got about 267 miles town driving 

[LazyLunatic]

town driving i get 20-25mpg and on a run its about 30. If i want to have fun, its a lot less

i thought something was wrong but it was just me adjusting from a bottomless tank in a 1.5td van

[thai-wronghorse]

I most definitely agree with the lower half of the fuel tank seeming to drop significantly quickly than the top half....poxy gauges . senders.

[FlySpeck]

its the shape of the tank.

Its curved and narrower at the bottom, and flat on top, so the lower half has a steeper height-to-volume drop that the top half which is pretty square dimensioned so it drops evenly. Like a bowl....the bottom half has less in it than the top half.

[thai-wronghorse]

That in my eyes makes it sh!t then as you'd have thought that VW would have taken that into consideration when designing the fuel gauge sender??

[FlySpeck]

I agree mate.

unfortunately they all use a float-driven variable resistor so "level" is still "level", but under a constant flow, the resistance values of the sender as it goes from full to empty can only follow the top surface of the fuel, and as you can see a round bottomed tank will not give a linear reading from top to bottom as the curved lower part has less volume.

I would have thought a better idea would be a load sensor / strain-gauge that measured the weight of the fuel in the tank - and could exactly display the tank contents to the millilitre as fuel has a known weight, like water does, due to its specific gravity value.

The strain gauge could be mounted in a small depression in the bottom centre of the tank so it gets a pretty constant reading.