Anybody else get confused by whether the arrow represents where the car should be or the pump?
I don't ever recall the arrow being paid attention to until listicles and other blog spam were born. It has all the elements of great clickbait.
Id think that for a car you own you wouldnt need it after the first few times though.
I like the way EVs have the squiggly hose icon and that tells you everyting.it doesn't depict the charger station, but the plug point on the vehicle.
*Technically* it could be less ambiguous, but actually it is good enough.
If memorising this is hard, not a big problem, parking next to fuel pump twice is not that huge of a damage.
The design I used to find confusing was the controls for periodic windshield wipers: does the width the triangle indicator represent frequency or period? I eventually just managed to memorize that it means frequency because you get more wiping as you turn it “up”. I don’t think anyone else ever found this ambiguous; we all have our little intuition gaps, I guess.
You don't pull up next to Paris, but I would get a chuckle if the icon had a little Eiffel tower instead of a gas pump.
The fact that it is consistent across vehicles sort of mitigates the problems with it. "Arrow points at fuel door" is not actually hard to remember.
Im not a regular car user, if at all Im renting - but the last 10 times(?) it was always just on the side of the driving seat
Might just be a coincidence
That would mean designing two separate entire fuel tank placements, fuel lines, etc for cars that are available both in left- and right-hand drive variants, with different SKUs for each of the parts needed. There is no way a car manufacturer would do that.
Fun fact, for single exhaust cars, the exhaust will usually be on the driver side, in order to route around the fuel tank :-)