That car had a mechanical fuel pump (not electric), that’s why.
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I believe that was a different type of pump. Mechanical on the old bug vs electrical fuel pump on the newer vehicles. The electric fuel pumps are cooled by the fuel passing through. Mechanical ones, not so much. I ran out of gas a couple of times with a vehicle with an electric fuel pump due to an incorrect fuel gauge. Pump didn’t burn up, but I’m sure it would if you tried it enough times.
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Actually the old VW fuel pump was electric, but of course not inside the tank like nowadays.
Did not know that. Most domestics that I’ve fooled around with that had a carburetor also had a mechanical fuel pump. I suppose electronic fuel pumps came about in conjunction with fuel injection for the most part. Never really thought about it and just made that connection.
Your VW must have been modified.
The mechanical fuel pump on a Beetle is located between the distributor and generator.
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There are actually 2 capacities for fuel tanks.
- Dry capacity, which for yours is you say is 14.5 gals.
- Useable capacity, which Is how much you can actually use before the fuel pump is sucking air. Most likely this is not published in the manual. If your vehicle was still running you haven’t reached that yet.
Bottom line is quit looking for problems where there are none !!
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I’ve owned cars for 40 years. Last 15 years have always had at least 3 in the driveway, sometimes 6. One current car I’ve had 15 years, one 4yrs, just sold one that I’d had 5 years, just had one written-off in an accident that I’d had 14 years.
All of them get driven to bare-bones empty, by that I mean light-on for at least a day and keep going, until at my cheapest local station. Always have, always will. Have run out of fuel once in my life in a diesel 4x4.
Now to the fuel pumps…
I’ve replaced precisely 1 fuel pump in one car from failure and that was 5 years ago in my (currently) 21 year old BMW E46. That was on it’s original pump.
All this apparent theory and doom-rationalising about absolute certain failure of fuel pumps if you dare whisper within earshot of the fuel pump goblins that you might use more than (Shock!) 50% (Horror!) 75% of design capacity of your tank is absolute and utter hilarity.
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Yeah…I think it’s the fuel going through the pump that cools it. The fuel around it, meh. However, if the fuel gets low enough that the pump sucks air and not fuel, I believe you can burn one up. I don’t live as close to the edge as you. I fill up somewhere around 1/8 tank. I don’t like to see the low fuel light come on. Dash lights in general give me anxiety anyway. I’m 47 and have only had one fuel pump fail thus far…but it was a mechanical pump on the side of a small block Chevy engine. Two of my current vehicles have over 180k miles and are 16 years old, the other is 8 years old with about 150k. Now that I’ve said that, all 3 of my cars will need a fuel pump tomorrow 
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