I think people are just plain paranoid. Is it not true that nearly every car produced since like 1995 (or even earlier) it is nearly impossible to siphon gas out of the tank?
I have seen locking gas caps fly off the shelf faster than the price of gas went up.....I should have bought stock in Stant!!
I don't know for sure about other cars...but I had to drop a nearly full tank off of a 1988 Buick LeSabre as the pump was in the process of dying. My first thought was to siphon the gas out of the tank...but I hit something (a screen?) that the siphon hose would not go past.
In the end I disconnected a fuel line, jumpered the terminals of the pump solenoid behind the glovebox and let the fuel pump do all the work. It lasted long enough to empty the tank.
In any event, one way to solve the problem is to drive a Diesel. I would have to think that this would tend to dampen the spirits of a fuel-stealing soul who tapped a tank of Diesel and started putting it into a can of already collected gasoline. You get extra points for having a tankful of veggie grease onboard if they tap into it!
I tend to think people are silly and paranoid for the most part. Locking gas caps *can* be broken and removed. I've seen it happen some years back when my mom forgot the keys to unlock a gas cap on my dad's 1970s-something Chevy truck.
Tell that to the neighborhood mesicans who regularly siphon my 93 Sierra and 93 Voyager at night. An 8 inch piece of coat hanger holds that little door open really well while the hose is inserted and the fuel extracted. This started when gas hit $2.50 a gallon. My $100 fillup was 95% gone the next morning. Hell, once they left an empty 5 gallon can sitting by my truck!
The locking caps have worked all this week on both our vehicles. No more midnight fillups for these guys.
They're working for me, so my $9.95 each was money well spent.
'A silent alarm, and a deer rifle with night vision scope. One second they're stealing, the next, they're merely a pink haze glistening in the soft moonlight....'
I have seen a lot of people that have had fuel stolen but none of the theifs want to leave tracks and will not risk drilling the tank to get fuel because the whole idea is to take some fuel and hope it is unnoticed and never looked into until a tank that has been holed and has a big stinky puddle on the ground. Besides only a fool would drill into a gas because the sparks from the armatur brushes in a cordless drill could ignite gas as well as the tempature of drill tip because gas auto ignites at about 490 degrees.
Reminds me of the thief who tried to siphon fuel out of an RV using his mouth. Cops found him on the ground, unconscious and near death. They also found the other end of the hose he used as a siphon in the septic tank pump-out (not much light when he was "working"... hell, not much light up there to work with, anyhow...)
I think people are just plain paranoid. Is it not true that nearly every
impossible to
a piece of large diameter vacuum line (which is small in comparison to your average garden hose) will usually drop down into almost any tank regardless of year, if you twist it while dropping it in. it is a slow way to get fuel out, but it will work if you have no other way to drain your tank (and it only takes a fracion of the amount of suction to get the siphon started).
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