[the roadie]

I get "RANGE LO" on mine when it's at red line, but the sender is still good because the gauge still reads accurately.

Is your gauge also reading poorly?

Don't trust the gauge OR the DIC readout if you have a flaky sender. Start using one of the trip odometers and be conservative and fill up after the miles traveled gets to near what you used to get out of a tank.

 

[the roadie]

On a well-running system, you might get the RANGE: 40 display when the analog gauge is at red line. Then the low fuel light goes on, it dings at you, the DIC goes to RANGE-LO, and the analog needle ONLY THEN goes below the bottom of the scale. Most of us don't physically run out until the analog needle is significantly below the bottom.

If you ran out of fuel, and the analog gauge had just arrived at the bottom of the scale, then the sender is definitely at fault. And once it starts going bad it never recovers.

The algorithms are baked into the software flash memory, and aren't editable or resettable by users like us. I've never even seen it in a table accessible by tuning software.