re: is it bad to leave your car running while pumping gas

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I've been driving 23 years

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quite an accomplishment, congrats

I always turn the car off.. just a habit. I never leave the pump going alone.. I've already had a pump fail to stop whenever the tank was full and spewed gas everywhere.. I was there to stop it...If I wasn't, i'd be a gigantic a-hole and a fire hazard.

I had a Ford pickup once that I think would consume the gasoline almost as fast as you could pump it in.

What a piece of shite that thing was.

The other day, I had a dead battery and was going to get a new one, but I needed gas, so I left it running while I put in like 10 bucks. I wasn't going to turn the car off and wait God knows how long for a friendly Houstonian with time on his hands.

Are you too lazy to turn it off? Why would you leave it running? My uncle use to own a gas station, he retired about 10 yrs ago, but I would always go by and shoot the shite with them. They offered full service and if someone had their car running they would ask them to kill it before pumping, but if someone left it running on the self-service they wouldn't say anything.. With that said, it was amazing how many people they would have to tell to put out their cigarette.

People would get out, put the pump in, light up and smoke while pumping.. I never understood how anyone would think that was a good idea.

I think we are generally in agreement.

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But the flame to light them does

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The problem with cigarettes is lighting them, not smoking them, as you stated and as I stated in a previous post.

It's logic vs fear, really.

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can create static

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Maybe (I'm not sure why, though), you're more likely to create static by getting back into and out of your car.

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put the pump in, light up and smoke while pumping

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The lighting up is the really scary part. I dislike smoking to start with so I'd prefer people not do it anyway.

An interesting page in general and an interesting segment on cigarettes as lighters.

Stupid Movie Physics

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Cigarettes as Lighters We have seen a controlled experiment where a lit cigarette was introduced into a mixture of a few drops of gasoline and pure oxygen. The result: a very loud explosion, so... Before proceeding further we want to emphasize that under the right circumstances a cigarette can ignite gasoline with horrific results.

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Finally, we decided to conduct an experiment. We poured a very small amount of gasoline in an aluminum pie pan or slightly deeper cake pan and placed it in the middle of a concrete slab. The pie and cake pans were chosen because they allowed the gasoline to spread out into a very shallow puddle the way it would if spilled on the ground. It also pretty much guaranteed that the vapors at some point above the pan would mix enough with air to form an ignitable mixture. We lit a cigarette and tossed it into the pan. The cigarette paper wicked up gasoline and quenched the glowing tip without igniting anything (see Figure 4). We tossed in more lit cigarettes. We tried lighting gasoline soaked paper towels. We used long tongs for reaching far away objects to hold glowing cigarettes over the pan at various heights. More than once we placed several glowing cigarettes in the pan (see Figure 5). Our record was 40 glowing cigarettes at one time. In most cases, we allowed the glowing cigarettes to smolder until they went out. Various experiments were conducted at different times of the day with different air temperatures and humidity. A total of 223 cigarettes of 11 different types were eventually used all without ever igniting the gasoline. Yet, at the end of each experimental session the gasoline was successfully lit using a single match attached to a long pole (see figures 6 and 7). The gasoline would typically ignite just before the match touched it.

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No, because then gasoline is sprayed everywhere and creates a fire hazard.