Roughly one year ago, Ford Archives and Heritage Brand Manger Ted Ryan, revisited a cool piece of Blue Oval history - the Moylan Arrow, which is an idea dreamed up by former Ford engineer Jim Moylan, who found himself rather frustrated with the fact that there wasn't a simple way to know which side of a vehicle the gas tank was located on. The resulting arrow ultimately wound up not only in Ford vehicles, but quickly spread across the industry - it just made too much sense, after all.
Sadly, a year later, we're learning that Jim Moylan has passed away at the age of 80, according to Automotive News. He leaves behind quite the legacy, which extends beyond a feature that all of us have found useful at least once in our lives, one that started when he was born in Detroit - a city he also grew up in. Moylan originally joined Ford as a draftsman in the body engineering department in 1968, and wound up in plastics engineering in the '70s following a short layoff.
Moylan spent some time in Hiroshima, Japan, in the 1980s as a result of Ford's partnership with Mazda before retiring in 2003, but of course, he's most well-known for the Moylan Arrow, which stems from one rainy day in 1986, when he pulled a company car into a gas station to refuel it - only to discover that he parked on the wrong side of the pump. Moylan wound up getting soaked, which set of a proverbial light bulb - what if cars had an arrow near the fuel indicator gauge as a quick, visual reference to inform drivers which side is used to refuel?
“I got back to my office after the meeting, and without even taking my coat off, I sat down and started writing the first draft of this proposal,” Moylan told Design News in 2020. “I typed it up and turned it in and forgot completely about it." "The indicator or symbol I have in mind would be located near the fuel gauge,” Moylan wrote in his proposal to his boss, R. F. Zokas, “and simply describe to the driver on which side of the vehicle the fuel fill door is located.” By 1989, the Moylan Arrow began showing up in Ford vehicles, and the rest, as they say, is history.
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