This Chart Shows How Far Your Car Can Drive On An Empty Tank

When you’re travelling, one of the most worrying moments is when the petrol lights turns on.

Who knows how many miles you have left before the car grinds to a halt? What if you can’t get to a garage in time? It’s incredibly nervewracking, never more so when you’re driving in a foreign country and are panicking that you’ll be stranded.

Thankfully, there’s now a helpful chart that will mean you’ll never have to worry about having to coast on fumes again.

You can drive your tank on empty, at least for a while

Your Mechanic, a car maintenance and repair company, created the chart. They warned that persistently driving on empty can damage your car – but we all know that it accidentally happens once in a while.

The company made a chart that has the number of gallons of petrol your car tank contains, and how far you can expect to get with that. It includes the 50 top-selling cars from 2015, as according to Your Mechanic.

Surprisingly, you can get around 50 to 100 miles on an ’empty’ tank of petrol, the chart suggests. In reality, this will depend on driving conditions, the condition of the car and how you drive, so it’s just an approximation.

This chart explains how far your car can go with an empty tank

To give you an accurate idea of exactly how far you can drive, we’ve mapped out what these bonus miles actually look like. Because who could tell you two things that are 60 miles apart, really?

The chart covers all kinds of car, from Jeep to Ford.

From the Empire State Building to Brooklyn in New York City – 10 miles

From Alexandra Palace to the Greenwich Royal Observatory in London – 22 miles

From Los Angeles to Disneyland in the US – 30 miles

From Edinburgh to Glasgow in Scotland – 50 miles

From London to Brighton – 66 miles

From Washington, DC to the Shenandoah National Park in the US – 70 miles

Please don’t take this as an encouragement to drive with an empty tank, as it can be dangerous – just know that if the gauge is pointing to empty and you’re not quite at a petrol station yet, you don’t need to panic right away.

About the author

Alice Johnston

Food Editor

Alice is always planning her next meal. She studied English at the University of Bristol before getting her Master’s in newspaper journalism from City University London. She worked on Femail at Mail Online for 18 months writing about lifestyle and food and has also worked at Metro.co.uk, The Guardian, Mumsnet and The Sun. After starting at Culture Trip as a Social Content Producer writing travel and lifestyle stories, she was promoted to the role of Food Editor and now specialises in culinary culture, trends and social issues around food. When she’s not writing, eating or travelling, she can be found cooking overly elaborate dinners, reading cookbooks in bed or playing with her cat, Orlando. Her favourite foods include fishfinger sandwiches, burnt caramel panna cotta, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and oysters.