Bought car, driving 1600 miles home.
At next stop I was watching miles left to empty. Basically had it to where when we stopped for dinner based on miles left it would be 30 to empty. Left dinner, car died after about 5 miles. Yes I was heading to gas station which was about 2 miles furthur.
There are several reasons why it could run out with a distance to empty (DTE) estimate of about 30 miles showing. A mis-calibrated fuel sensor or a problem with the fuel pickup location are possibilities, but not the only ones; other real possibilities are that conditions changed and your gas mileage dropped significantly soon before running out (did they?), or going up an incline made the last bit of fuel unreachable (or both).
At any rate, this is a good example of why you shouldn't push the envelope, especially in an unfamiliar vehicle.
Next tank I decided to test if I had a brain fart or miles to empty is broke or misleading. See pic attached. I filled up with 15.1 gallons, calculated mpg, and did (18.5-15.1)*MPG
My calculation says I had about 115 miles to bone dry car stalling empty.
Was your calculated mileage 33.8 MPG?
Did you put 15.1 gallons in at the point where that picture was taken, with the fuel gauge showing just over 1/4 tank on level ground? If so, that does seem like it may be reading high.
Was Trip B reset at the previous fill-up? If so, the displayed 34.7 MPG says you'd need 14.7 gallons to fill; those things often seem to run about 4% optimistic, which is consistent with your actual 15.1 gallons and also suggests that you didn't overfill to get 15.1 gal in there.
Trip computer was telling me (see pic) I had well over that to empty. Like 60 miles beyond running out.
The distance to empty calculation is based on a running average of
recent fuel consumption. Your calculated MPG was based on 15.1 gallons. They could easily have been significantly different.
I don't know the details of the algorithm used, but it's likely either a running tally of fuel used in some fixed distance, or distance traveled for a given fixed fuel quantity. That is, a continually-updated measure fuel used in the last, say, 50 km, or continually-updated measure of distance traveled using the last, say, 5 liters. [Those quantities are guesses.] It also could be an average mileage over some interval of time [last half hour?]. I wish I knew.
The upshot is that the DTE estimator has no way of knowing what kind of mileage you're
going to get for the remainder of the tank, only what you have gotten recently. Sometimes you will see DTE
increasing as you drive if you changed from a sustained poor-MPG situation to a much better one.
So I guess it's a "the more you know" thing but somehow I always expected these things to err on the side of caution -- not tell you you have more than you do.
Now that you know that you
can run out with 30 miles showing,
you know to err on the side of caution. The flip side is "that thing is
always pessimistic. I can go much further than it says..."
Know your car before you try to test its limits, and before taking any drastic action to "fix" something that may or may not be a problem. Run a few fill-ups and keep an eye on the numbers to see if there really is a problem before, say, having the tank dropped.
Good luck and enjoy your new car!