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The gas light is on now. It needs gas in it.
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If the fuel level is
extremely low, you can't get good fuel pressure to the injectors, the pressure sensor will set a fault code, and you'll have trouble getting an idle out of it - especially on an incline.
I've seen this before when a customer brought one to us for an intermittent bad idle that the dealer had no idea what was happening. We took a look at it and the fuel pressure was WAY lower than the lower limit. I leaned inside to turn the key off, and here the LOW FUEL light was on, and the needle was buried out of sight in the bottom of the dash somewhere. I stood up and said, "Hey, let's put five bucks' worth of gas in it before we do any more testing, OK?" (You can tell how long ago THIS was) The customer said, sure, go ahead. We put the gas in, restarted, retested, and - viola - good fuel pressure! Oh, and the idle was perfect. A little lumpy because of those early emissions controls, but reasonably good.
Asked the customer how often they ran the fuel down that far. The answer was, "Oh, I thought you weren't supposed to put gas in it until you saw the light come on..." We all just looked at each other - and here we'd gotten a TSB from one of the Big Three at the time warning not to run the fuel too low because the mixture would go way lean, you'd run the risk of maybe messing up the catalytic converter, and possibly doing damage to the fuel pump because it uses the fuel flowing through it to cool itself.
Tell you what - put gas in it and let us know how it does then...