Expert: Roland Finston - 6/26/2011

Question
ran out of gas know won,t start ran fine till then is there a trick I don,t know about to get restarted tried putinjg gas stait into throttle body it did nothing is there a way you have to prime again or something like that thanks Rob

Answer
Hi Rob,
Two thoughts: did you run out of gas, or maybe the car stalled for another reason and the guage was reading low which mislead you into thinking you ran out?
Just in case try using the ignition key to get any fault codes that may be stored in the engine controller:"on-off-on-off-on and leave on" doing that in 5 seconds or less elapsed time. Then watch the odometer window to see if the mileage reading changes to show any 4-digit numbers preceded by a P. If so, let me know what they are and we'll go from there.
If you really ran out of gas, then you may want to put in another couple of gallons just in case it is a priming problem. Also, when you first turn the key from 'off' to 'run', do you hear the fuel pump humm from inside the gas tank, which it should do for about 1 second. If not, then there is an issue with electric power not getting to the pump, so let me know that too.
Otherwise, if the pump humms for a second, then you could check to see whether you are getting fuel pressure at the fuel rail at the engine where there is a port in the line into which you can attach a fuel pressure gauge to see if you have about 50 psi while cranking it over.
One of those tests will get us going in the right direction.
Roland
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