Reduced Performance Warning Light

I was down to just under one gallon of fuel in the tank. (trying to get a feel for how accurate the low fuel warning is!). AFTER I filled up completely, an amber warning triangle and 'Reduced Performance' message appeared. Car sputtered a bit as well. I turned the engine off then on and warning/sputtering ceased. Should I be concerned?

SSamson, one of the Australian member got a similar message. See thread link below

Restricted Performance

Thanks for the link! Perhaps concern is called for after all.

There seem to be two separate parts to this.

The link you highlighted above seems to be where the car goes into a safety mode, perhaps because the onboard systems have noticed something wrong with one of its sensors.

The second is a design feature of the engine. When you start to get to a low fuel level the vehicle will show the "Reduced Performance" message and will cut down the power of the engine. It's designed as a failsafe system I guess so you don't run out of fuel. Once you have filled up you might find that it needs to be turned on and off to allow the system to reset but that should then get you back to normal.

Hope this helps

Steve

Priming a high pressure fuel system is apparently very difficult, also the fuel pump and some parts of the fuel system are lubricated by the fuel so running the tank to dry would do terminal damage to the system.

Thanks Steve, I linked it as I was not sure if they were related or not. Thanks for the clarification.

Very helpful. Thanks all.

As said the car will get restricted engine performance when low on fuel.

The car low fuel light is set to come on at 7ltrs according the the engine controller and will restrict the engine perfomance at 6ltrs.

Thanks, useful information

I had a similar issue after filling up with 56.85L (so 3.15L left in tank, I suppose, which is ~0.7 gallons). After filling up, went straight onto dual carriageway and then red "restricted performance" triangle appeared. Didn't seem to have any effect on car, cruising at 60mph-ish, but pulled over a few miles down the road at next safe place to do so, turned engine off, left it a minute, and turned back on again -- no warning messages at all. And I hadn't pressed the "[OK] to clear" when the first message was there.

I called LRA who said that if there are no messages then it's safe to drive and not to worry about it if the message doesn't come back. They said if I want I could get someone to come and look at it, but they weren't concerned, but to definitely get it looked at if it happens again.

That was when the car had done 427 miles; it's now done 1700ish and I've had no problems and equally haven't asked them to come and do any diagnostics on it.

I'd hope/presume that if they say it's okay if the light doesn't come back, then it is.

Reading this post about the low fuel levels is reassuring.