I pulled up to the pump on the wrong side again

Rental car, pouring rain. I stretched the hose as far as it goes, and it doesn't go that far. — Business traveler, 1988

James Moylan was an engineer at Ford, and one rainy day in 1986 he pulled a company car up to the pump on the wrong side. Got soaked. Plenty of people have done that. He's the one who went back to his desk and did something about it: a little arrow next to the gas gauge, pointing at the side the cap is on. Took Ford seven months to say yes. It's on nearly every car now. You're welcome to look at it sometime.

Noted: the little arrow by your gas gauge has a name, the Moylan arrow, and nearly every car has one.

The full file

The first cars with the arrow were the 1989 Ford Escort and Mercury Tracer. Moylan sent in his idea on April 17, 1986, and Ford's director of interior design wrote back on November 18 to say it would go on the 1989 models.

He never patented it, and no law says a car has to have it. For about 30 years nobody outside Ford knew who'd thought of it. In 2018 a podcast called Every Little Thing tracked him down.

Mercedes might argue. Its 1976 W123 had a low-fuel light shaped like a triangle that pointed at the filler side, though Mercedes itself couldn't say whether that was on purpose. Its first one on record for the job came in 1997.

Moylan joined Ford in 1968, retired in 2003 and died in Detroit in December 2025, at 80. Most of us will leave less behind.