Car:1, Me:0
So the rental company gives me a Chevy HHR. Everything’s going fine until the low fuel indicator goes off and I pull into a gas station to refuel. I look down to where the gas cap door release pull is located on most cars. Nothing. I scanned all the buttons on the dash. Nothing that appears to be related to the gas cap door. I get out of the car and look under the floor mat. I walk over to the gas cap door and try to pry it open with my bare hands. No luck. I get back in the car and stare blankly at the buttons again, willing the answer to suddenly appear.
Finally, feeling like a defeated moron, I decide I have enough gas to make it home and I will figure it out later. I go inside, turn on my computer, and google “hhr car gas cap open” and a whole page of complaints appear, second of which is this helpful gem*:
This is the gas cap door on a friend’s car. Can you guess how to open it? The first time my friend went to put gas in his car he spent about half an hour at the gas station trying to figure out how to open his gas cap door! He looked everywhere for some knob to pull to release the gas cap door. He looked under the dashboard, in the glove box, behind the seats, in the trunk. To no avail. The gas station attendant didn’t know how to open it either. Finally someone drove in to get gas who knew the secret. You just push in on one edge of the gas cap door, and it swivels open! Wow, it only took 1/2 hour to figure out how to do something that should have been immediately obvious!
Design suggestion
This design is bad because there is no visible control for opening the gas cap door. For example, putting a small raised non-slip surface on the to-be-pushed edge of the door might make it more likely that people would expect to push it. Putting a small lip on the opposite edge might make it more likely that people would expect to pull it.
*This is the abbreviated version. The long story is I actually called my dad first. I had googled “Chevy HHR manual” and was slogging through sites selling the car manual. My dad used two fingers** to peck out “hhr car gas cap open” into his google search bar and got immediate results. The teasing I received from him was also immediate. Therefore, even more so: Fuck you, Chevy.
**Maybe he didn’t actually use two fingers.
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