The Inventor Of The Little Arrow That Tells You What Side The Fuel Filler Is On Has Died

These days cars are smarter and more feature-packed than ever, but sometimes it's the simple, little things that can make all the difference. There's one now-ubiquitous detail that benefits millions of drivers every single day, saving them time and reducing stress, and you may not even realize it was something that needed to be invented — or how recently it was thought up. I'm talking about the little arrow in your gauge cluster that tells you which side of the car the fuel filler is on, which was thought up in 1986 by former Ford employee James Moylan, who died on December 11 at age 80. Automotive News' obituary tells his story, which is further proof that the best ideas really can come from anywhere.

That little arrow feels like such a no-brainer that I wouldn't blame you for assuming cars have had them for decades longer than the late '80s, but until Moylan came up with the idea, drivers were left having to remember it themselves or take a guess, if it was a car they weren't familiar with. (This was less of a problem with older cars, where the fuel filler was often at the rear end, sometimes behind the license plate.) Even with pretty much every new car of the past few decades having the arrow, we all still know the annoyance of pulling up to a pump and realizing the gas cap is on the other side.

James Moylan was born in Detroit on December 19, 1944, and was hired by Ford as a draftsman in body engineering in March 1968. He was laid off in the '70s, but was later brought back to the company to work in plastics engineering, a growing sector as cars were getting smaller and cheaper. The idea came to Moylan on a rainy day in April 1986 when he hopped in one of Ford's employee fleet cars to drive to a meeting at another building. He had to fill up on the way, and, of course, parked with the wrong side of the car facing the gas pump, getting soaked by rain when he moved it. Moylan said he immediately had the idea to put an arrow in the gauge cluster indicating which side the gas cap is on, writing a draft of a "product convenience suggestion" proposal as soon as he got back to his desk.

In the proposal, which included a sketch of what it could look like (though using an illustration of the fuel door open, not just a simple arrow), Moylan said "Even if all Ford product lines eventually locate on the same side, for the minor investment involved on the company's part, I think it would be a worthwhile convenience not only for two car families, but also pool car users and especially car rental customers." He sent it off to his boss and promptly forgot all about it, until getting a reply seven months later from R. F. Zokas, a director of interior design, who said the arrow would be added to 1989 model year cars that were under development. The 1989 Ford Escort and Mercury Tracer were the first to use it, followed by the Ford Thunderbird and Mercury Cougar.

In the late '80s, after submitting his proposal, Moylan was stationed in Japan when Ford partnered with Mazda. He went to night school to get a Bachelor of Science degree in plastics manufacturing and engineering from the University of Detroit Mercy in 1999, and retired in July 2003 after more than 30 years at Ford. 

There isn't a lot of information or a consensus out there about which brands were next to adopt the Moylan arrow or when it started happening, but it doesn't seem to have started getting widespread until later in the 1990s. Now, of course, you'd be hard-pressed to find a car that doesn't have the Moylan arrow, or at least some indicator of which side the fuel filler is on. It's not just present on gas-only cars, either. EVs also have a gauge cluster arrow to tell you which side of the car the charging port is on, and in cars like the new Nissan Leaf that has separate ports on each side for slow charging and DC fast charging, they'll show which side is which. I'm currently driving a plug-in-hybrid Mercedes-AMG S63, and the gauge cluster has separate sections for both fuel level and charge level, with an arrow showing which side each filler is on. For people like us Jalops that are always jumping in and out of different cars, the Moylan arrow really makes a difference.