While I’m all for a future full of electric cars, I wonder what kind of financial burden this will put on petrol stations or even if charging stations fit the same paradigm as gas pumps since they take much longer to charge
Also, since margins on petrol are so low, many petrol stations make their profit from their shops, not from the fuel itself. Since it takes some time for a car to charge, customers are likely to spend more time and therefore more money in the petrol station’s shop.
Since so few of them are, I assume that it's not beneficial.
If the government wants this, it should pay station owners to do it.
Cause and effect. It would be profitable if there were enough BEVs, and there would be enough BEVs if people weren’t afraid they might not be able to find somewhere to recharge.
At least, that’s the logic.
A failing of modern economic theory, assuming that every entity acts logically and in their best interest.
Is it bad that I don't really care?
I mean we've seen what happens when companies are left to their own accord. Sometimes an external pressure is required.
I hope to see one day that gas stations have become obsolete.
Chargers require capital outlay. Unless you can prove that your revenue is going to offset the capital outlay fairly quickly (<1 year), I'm not going to do it given the margins on most gas stations.
If it were a great deal (measuring by NPV), you'd see companies formed to raised capital and install charging stations at gas stations in some sort of revenue sharing / land leasing arrangement. In fact, there are such companies, and they are slowly marching down the path.
Again, if the government wants to make this happen, there's an easy solution: provide the capital.
So you could argue it's would be in the best interest of the owners to not allowing charging stations, as that would help to slow the uptake of EVs.
And the majority of these 'every day commuters' would currently own conventional cars.
Those who drive electric cars would be charging their cars at home and as such hardly every need to stop in these stores.
By replacing conventional cars with EVs will only see that tight profit margin getting tighter.
And that's with me making few convenience stops. There's lots of people that get a coffee every day, they aren't buying gas each time.
That said, this is designed to increase BEV ownership levels, which might lead to large queues if the stations all only have one charger… but that would lead to natural economic incentives for fast chargers and more of them even without government incentives or extra laws.
And charging points could — in principle at least, I’m no civil engineer — go in any parking place too, so there’s room for more entrepreneurs make up for the need for more places to park and wait to recharge.
It is also a downgrade for long haul trips, depending on how long of breaks you take while driving.
That being said, I might buy an electric truck to replace my work truck once I can afford it.
"Yes sir, it's an EV charger. It takes 3 days to charge your car"
https://www.abwasser-analysezentrum.de/branchenuebersicht/mi...
I fully expect the future to have charging stations pretty much everywhere there's parking, power, and demand. If gas stations are clogged up by EV charging, it won't be long before charging spots are popping up everywhere to capitalize on it.
The chargers in rest stops/stations road side will be where business is.
With such a big range, we don’t need a lot of gas stations anymore (it’s more like the square term in the coverage of an area makes the number of gas stations extremely sensitive to the average range, but long story short, we need less and less of them)
What Germany has done here is bit comparable to say forcing a burger joint to offer vegan options or a juice joint to serve alcohol for no reason other than pandering to the niche users.
Gas stations might not even be ideal providers of charging stations, other business such as restaurants, malls, salons, etc. where people spend a lot of time are more better suited to provide charging stations and in fact they already do.
This sort of government coercion is another reason why I think electric car ownership or general move to cleaner fuels will be seen with skepticism by many people like me.
Secondly, we can't deliberate for another 15 years for every scepting to come round and for the market to sort itself out. Every year of setback in climate change mitigation will incur massive financial damange in the future.