2Wheeltips

Knowing how far you can ride on the fuel reserve is something every biker should know. It lets you focus on enjoying a long day of riding without worrying about running out of gas in some out of the way place. Until you know, the fuel reserve will be a source of concern. Here is a simple way to calculate how many miles you can go on the reserve:

When does the reserve kick in?
    •    Fill up the tank and set the tripmeter to 0.
    •    Make note of how many miles you rode when the fuel reserve indicator came on or you needed to flip the fuel reserve switch.

I can usually ride 160 miles before needing to flip to the reserve. So let's use 160 miles for this example.

How big is your tank and reserve?
Look in your motorcycle owners manual and get the fuel tank capacity and the fuel reserve amount. Here are the amounts for my bike:
    •    4.76 fuel tank capacity
    •    1.16 fuel reserve amount

Remember the fuel reserve is NOT separate from the fuel tank capacity. So for my bike the total fuel tank size is 4.76 gallons......NOT (4.76 + 1.16)..... or 5.92 gallons. So you need to calculate the size of the main tank by subtracting the fuel reserve amount from the fuel tank capacity.
    •    4.76 - 1.16 = 3.6 gallons.

So here the main fuel tank is 3.6 gallons. This is how many gallons I used to ride 160 miles.

On my bike I can ride an additional 51 miles on the fuel reserve. This number will vary based on how your ride, but I can safely ride 41 more miles before I need to get gas.