Im not a regular car user, if at all Im renting - but the last 10 times(?) it was always just on the side of the driving seat
That would mean designing two separate entire fuel tank placements, fuel lines, etc for cars that are available both in left- and right-hand drive variants, with different SKUs for each of the parts needed. There is no way a car manufacturer would do that.
Fun fact, for single exhaust cars, the exhaust will usually be on the driver side, in order to route around the fuel tank :-)
Might just be a coincidence
I don't ever recall the arrow being paid attention to until listicles and other blog spam were born. It has all the elements of great clickbait.
Id think that for a car you own you wouldnt need it after the first few times though.
I like the way EVs have the squiggly hose icon and that tells you everyting.it doesn't depict the charger station, but the plug point on the vehicle.
*Technically* it could be less ambiguous, but actually it is good enough.
If memorising this is hard, not a big problem, parking next to fuel pump twice is not that huge of a damage.
The design I used to find confusing was the controls for periodic windshield wipers: does the width the triangle indicator represent frequency or period? I eventually just managed to memorize that it means frequency because you get more wiping as you turn it “up”. I don’t think anyone else ever found this ambiguous; we all have our little intuition gaps, I guess.
You don't pull up next to Paris, but I would get a chuckle if the icon had a little Eiffel tower instead of a gas pump.
The fact that it is consistent across vehicles sort of mitigates the problems with it. "Arrow points at fuel door" is not actually hard to remember.