A man in Chicago, Illinois, has left many drivers questioning what they’re seeing on their own dashboards after he shared a video on TikTok that appears to show his gas range dropping within seconds while he was driving. In the clip, which has now racked up over 3 million views, the man recorded his dashboard as he drove through city streets at speeds below 30 mph.
At the start of the video, his range showed 352 miles. By the end of the 47-second clip, it had dropped to 348. This stood out to most viewers because the number appeared to fall quickly despite the short distance he had covered. The man himself came up with his own theory of what could have caused that dip, claiming he may have bought “watered down gas.”
This set off a lot of panic in his comment section, where many people began sharing their own experiences, with some saying they had noticed similar changes in their fuel readings. “I knew it!! I dont ever use a half of tank of gas to drive one hour on the freeway in my Honda civic… but yesterday I sure did,” one person said. Another wrote, “My Toyota is at the gas station every 3 days. This isnt ok.” A third also added, “I’ve been telling my family this and nobody believed me.”
Some couldn’t even wrap their head around what they had seen in the video. “How did you lose 4 miles worth of gas before you actual went a mile with your car 💀,” one comment read. Someone else remarked, “Losing that much Going under 30mph is crazyyyy.”
However, not everyone agreed that anything unusual was happening. Some commenters pushed back, saying the numbers shown on the dashboard do not always reflect actual fuel loss.
One TikTok user @jc explained that “frequent stops at lights,” “rise in temperatures,” and how a person is driving through a city can affect how quickly the fuel range appears to drop. They added that after filling up, a car’s system can take time to calculate fuel efficiency, which may cause the displayed range to adjust quickly at first.
“When you fill up your tank to a good amount the computer takes awhile to start registering how much gas you actually have and it calculates your actual mpg instead of tank innage,” they wrote. “The number goes down because your cars calculator is doing the math to match you [sic] mpg.”
Even with those explanations, netizens remain split between those who believe something is off with the gas they have been purchasing and those who say it’s simply how modern cars calculate fuel usage.
