I’ve often wondered what is the average distribution of fuel caps one the left side of a car compared to the right side of a car. Are there more cars with the cap on the left, or more cars with the cap on the right, or is it about even?
You maybe thinking this is a completely trivial question to be asking, but think of how much time you may spend waiting in a queue of cars at a petrol station while trying to get a bowser that matches the side your fuel cap is on and perhaps you can see that there is some method to my madness after all. I mean surely when you purchase a car one of the things to take into account is whether or not the car will statistically give you shorter queues at the petrol station. If time is money, how many dollars could be saved by minimizing the time spent at the service station.
Perhaps car manufacturers could start marketing their car as having the fuel cap specifically located to ensure minimal waits, but in the end such demand would ironically lead to longer waits. Maybe instead the car manufactures could just randomize the side so that about 50% of the cars would have it on the left and 50% would have it on the right, just to ensure that no side was favored over the other.
I suppose in the end you could argue that you could just go to the first free one, regardless of where your fuel cap is, and just stretch it across, but what if you stopped just too far away for the short nozzle to reach. In fact I bet most people would still queue up for a pump that suits their car rather than stretching unless the queue is exceptionally long, or they are in a big rush.
An interesting plot for global domination could be to somehow make every car have the fuel cap placed on the same side, and every petrol pump to have a nozzle that is too short to stretch around the back. This would then increase the wait time leading to more people arriving at work later. The total affect would lead to so much lost productivity and general frustration that the national economy would collapse. While the politicians are busy wondering what happened I can quickly step in and take control.