The end of the road for petrol stations? | Hacker News Reader

The end of the road for petrol stations?

bbc.co.uk

22 pointsKaibeezy29 comments

> If this prediction is correct it is a death sentence for many of the 8,380 petrol stations in the UK.

Not really. You'll need many fast charging sites because EVs charge slower than ICE cars re-fuel. Even the Hyundai Ioniq 5 still takes 18 minutes to go from 10 to 80% state of charge.

The petrol station model can still work. Circle K is doing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TVohXHjLro

Gridserve is doing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoN4WCpuxHY

BP is doing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaSRn6hYOwc

Shell is doing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nst2RGtgzfk

Repsol is doing it: https://insideevs.com/news/375020/repsol-most-powerful-charg...

Total is doing it: https://www.electrive.com/2021/05/03/charge4europe-and-total...

It's true that you'll also have fast and slow chargers in parking lots in urban areas. But it's also true that some sites that previously couldn't offer petrol re-fueling can now become more like petrol stations by offering EV charging, like 7-Eleven is doing in North America: https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/7-11-charging-station-ev-...

Gridserve has the right idea - a mini-mall with 36 chargers. You need something for people to do.

Hm. Churches? Large, under-utilized parking lots. "Charge up with God!"

I remember when the idea of time-staggered mixed-use development was novel —- offices over movie theaters to double-dip on the parking space demand.

EV charging creates an opportunity for some kind of 20-minute popular service.

Joe: Man, I could really go for a Starbucks, you know?

Frito: Yeah, well, I really don't think we have time...

Those all make sense for long trips. For the short trips, users will more likely charge at home and thus there will be less demand for "fuel" stations.

The claim in the article is made out of thin air. It is correct that fewer cars will need fossil fuels, but electric cars also need High Power Chargers when driving long distance.

In Norway, with EV's accounting for about 50% of new car sales, chargers are popping up everywhere. Some are located at parking spots and outside of shops.

But where are most of the chargers located? At petrol stations.

I think you can split fuel stations into groups - big ones along major routes, and little ones scattered everywhere. The big ones along major routes are probably going to be just fine, and they will install a large base of electric chargers, to cater for people doing long trips. The little fuel stations scattered everywhere are going to struggle, because chargers are popping up everywhere, and you won't need to visit a fuel station in your normal commuting/shopping activity.

That is a valid point, I think you might be on to something. The fuel stations along big major roads definitely more often have chargers, and also in larger quantities.

However, my experience is that inner city fuel stations often also have chargers. I can only speculate why that works, but I guess that many don't have access to a charger at home or at work.

When they do need to charge quickly, they might as well do it in a location where other car-related services are available, such as a bucket for washing your windshield (ABC), car wash, pump for filling air in tires, or a kiosk with coffee and bacon-rolled sausage.

In the US at least urban gas stations have been closing in droves. Their economics are marginal and the land is more valuable for other purposes. The only limiting factor is the extreme cost of remediating the pollution.

I can easily see a situation where gas stations on interstates start closing because of dwindling demand, and ICE car drivers start experiencing their own form of range anxiety, as in "will I be able to find a gas station before I run out?". It's already the case around Yosemite, for instance. Most likely those stations will add superchargers or the non-Tesla equivalent, and not go out of business altogether, but who knows?

Law-induced cultural differences will be huge though: where I live there are strict opening hours restrictions and the only exception is "travel needs" and it's not just something you formally register for, you have to operate a pump (or be part of a train station). The result is that the entire market of what is convenience stores elsewhere is owned by fuel stations here and many people suspect that they might actually sell the fuel at a loss to lure people into their absurdly high-margin all-hours supermarkets. But I doubt that "we have a few chargers" would be accepted as a qualification for the "travel needs" exception and then pumps wouldn't be at risk of going away.

(the "travel needs" exception lead to some hilarious regulatory quirks for a while, when in an attempt to curb streetside drinking, no doubt pushed by pub owner lobbyism, fuel stations where restricted from selling to people who didn't come by car. They were literally expected to check the parking lot before handing out liquor)

This article is about as scientific as anything you would see on Fox news. So all of those millions of petrol/diesel cars are all going to disappear overnight are they? It's been several years now that electric vehicles are mainstream and I still don't see any charging poles where I live.

I'm not even talking about how the electricity that goes in the cars is often far from clean, and how insane ecologically damaging it is to replace a perfectly working car with a new one. And what about the environmental impact of batteries... And so on.

Do you dispute the central claim, that petrol stations will struggle over the next 20 years as electric car use rises?

I don’t think the article alleges that ICE cars will disappear overnight. It merely claims that electric car growth will put pressure on petrol stations, forcing them to close which in turn further incentivises people to switch to electric. Seems fairly logical.

All these things take time to happen and hopefully things will change for the better; cleaner electricity, battery tech cleaner, more sustainable. The alternative is new ICE cars which cannot be better.

>I'm not even talking about how the electricity that goes in the cars is often far from clean, and how insane ecologically damaging it is to replace a perfectly working car with a new one. And what about the environmental impact of batteries... And so on.

You should! Except in regions where most electricity is generated from coal, it's far better to drive an EV than an ICE vehicle. And unless you drive the car on very rare occasions, it's also worth it to ditch the ICE for a new EV.

I suggest you watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjaUqUozwdc (with English translation, of course). The youtuber is French engineer who covers absolutely everything. The transcript is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KtiB4r-p35FeNb6jMv92HqR7..., which translate well to English with DeepL or Google Translate. All his sources are linked below the video, too (with peer-reviewed papers).

His previous video is on the issues that are specific with the battery themselves (sourcing, production, recycling, etc). It's a pretty deep dive, but there's so much to learn.

What if instead of slowly charging at a station you just dropped the battery and loaded a new one? That'd immediately resolve the charge speed issue. If we did that I imagine we'd see the return of something similar to the gas station.

Tesla tried it and scrapped it.

Overall, charging really will not be an issue. Most people will charge at home or work.

And in 2025-2030 there will be plenty of chargers that will push 200-300 km in 15 min on longer trips.

Nio tried it and has now done it two million times:

https://www.nio.com/blog/nio-completes-2000000-battery-swaps

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTsrDpsYHrw

This Nio article brings up a good point I didn't think about. If we had swapping stations like this then people could get the benefit of the latest battery technology (given it fits) without having to take in the vehicle for an upgrade or trade it in all together.

Better Place [2007-13] was a venture-backed international company that developed and sold battery charging and battery switching services for electric cars.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_(company)

Anecdotally...

- Friends who own a rural village petrol station are “selling out now before it’s worthless”.

- Other friends “will buy an EV as soon as they have solid state batteries” which charge “faster than pumping gas” and will be widespread “in a year or two”.

The transition away from horse and cart did not occur because governments decided it so but because the alternative was better. The push from ICE to BEVs is driven by regulation and not natural customer demand.

Weird, I don't know a single country on the planet where customers are forced to buy electric cars.

Stopping production of petrol/diesel cars and lowering carbon taxes on electric cars is pretty strong encouragement though.

The EU's and China's fleet emissions standards are forcing manufacturers increase their electric car sales. All manufacturers need to sell enough EVs (BEV, FCEV, and plug-in hybrid) to avoid fleet emissions fines.

And future bans on new car sales of petrol and diesel cars have been announced in various states and countries.

Norway by 2025: https://www.thedrive.com/news/7917/norway-doubles-down-on-pl...

The UK by 2030 (but plug-in hybrids still allowed): https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-54981425

California by 2035: https://www.npr.org/2020/09/23/916209659/california-governor...

Also London's Ultra-Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) that is going to be expanded to most of Greater London, and where non-EVs, including hybrids, will have to pay £12.50 a day. That will immediately make an ICE car unaffordable compared to a low-cost BEV like the Kia e-Niro, VW ID.4 or Renault Zoe.

"Natural customers" are demanding that the earth's temperature doesn't rise to the point where life becomes difficult. Regulating ICEs is one part of reducing that. The regulations don't arise spontaneously, they are enacted by politicians who in the west are democratically elected.

I didnt say it was illegitimate, only that its counter to innate consumer demand. The demand being maintaining excessive consumption and relying upon magical thinking that regulation and new technology will fix all. I’m trying to get fibre cable installed on my street which is proving to be difficult because the houses are old, theres a 17th century church nearby and the street is narrow and so on. Little snags like these make rolling charging infrastructure more challenging than simply passing laws decreeing what you want reality to look like

This article seems rather poor quality and devoid of much content. It reads like an infomercial script. The use of the first- and second-person gives it a real amateur vibe, and at times the tone approaches condescending.

A few example paragraphs:

> Electricity, by contrast, is pretty much everywhere already. Where's your car now? Do you think it might be near an electricity cable? Exactly.

> And you don't need to be Thomas Edison to work that out.

> In fact, free charging is likely to become like free Wi-Fi, a little bribe to lure you into the shop.

The conclusion of this article is more of a 'death sentence' to BBC online journalistic quality in the last half decade, than it being the 'end of the road' for petrol stations; written as if the owners of these stations won't adapt towards integrating with electric charging stations themselves rather than being withered away completely.

The comments section in the article says it all really.

They have only 8 years until all new cars in the UK must be zero emission so they have to start hammering it now to give people the time to mentally adjust to that new reality. You'll see more of this kind of stuff from BBC in the coming years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com