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Fuel Filler Door

The flap covering the filler neck, powered and locked by the vehicle on most modern cars. It is not just trim: it locks with the doors to deter siphoning, stays shut while the vehicle is moving, and on vehicles with a sealed fuel tank it will not open until the tank has been vented so the driver is not met by pressurised vapour.

That last behaviour causes most of the reported faults that are not faults. On a plug-in hybrid or a modern sealed-tank petrol, venting takes several seconds and longer with a full warm tank — a driver who presses the release once and gives up has not waited. And a filler door code alongside evaporative system faults is usually one problem, not two: the tank cannot vent, so the door is correctly refusing to open.

Stuck closed is the failure that strands people, since a car that cannot be refuelled has a finite range. Every vehicle has a manual release — normally a cable, loop or lever inside the boot behind a trim panel — and finding it before it is needed is worth five minutes.

Check the mechanics before the actuator. Ice in the latch, road salt, a bent hinge or a strained cable stop a door working and none of them is a motor fault.

Also known as: fuel flap, filler flap, fuel door, petrol flap, fuel filler flap, gas door

Referenced by 26 codes

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Codes involving this component (26)

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Information, not instruction

CarGeek is a reference, not a service manual. Its pages are written from public sources and from what other people have found, never from a manufacturer's own service information, so they can be wrong or incomplete for your particular vehicle. Some of what they describe carries real risk: high voltage, fuel under pressure, stored energy, hot and moving parts.

Have anything you intend to act on checked by a trained person against the manufacturer's own procedure for your vehicle. Nothing here replaces that procedure.

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