Over the past couple of months my gas guage is showing empty sooner and sooner which is driving me nuts. I usually counted on getting over 400 miles or more to a tank before heading to the gas station, now I don't trust going beyond 300 because I can't tell how much is left.

The guage has on two occaisons shown half a tank or even empty when I just filled it! Is this a simple fix or something more complicated? I'm hoping it's a simple matter of cleaning a connector and not having to get inside the tank.

 

it must be a sending unit (on a gas tank)

 

dam mine just did something similar, it read E with only 14.77 gallons down. (that with a whopping 170 miles covered)
I thought I was hitting 16 before the E, maybe I'm just crazy :dunno:

 

well ... i had the samiliar thing not on maxima but on my jag xjs. problem WAS with a sending unit - it would get stuck from time to time and later on I had to recalibrate it and fix this "stucking" problem (LOL)

PS: it was much easier to access a sending unit in xjs - right from the trunk

PS2: wasn't she a beauty (i don't have it any longer - not for canadian weather ...)

 

im having a similar problem, i know the car still has gas in it but the needle will read E, and also when i fill the tank the needle never reaches the full line it always stays a little bit below.

 

You want the tank to have gas when it reads E. Or when the gas light goes on.

 

Sure, I want the light to come on, but I don't need the tank to have 6 gallons left in it when it does. The gas light use to come on with about 3 gallons left, now it's six gallons or so, that's the problem.

 

Cheapest way is to replace it with another sensor assembly. The float might be binding or whatnot. But I've had two maximas so far. Each had slight differences in how much gas there was when the E light went on. In theory you could bend the float arm to make it show a different amount of gas left but good luck getting a good calibration.