Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

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Where’s the bottleneck?

Gas stations. The gas station industry has been avoiding upgrading pumps. It's expensive. Retail checkouts usually just need a replacement of the desktop unit, but gas pumps require actual modification. They got a 3-year delay, until October 2020. Then April 17, 2021. Then they got hit by the coronavirus epidemic.

The upgrade has to be done by a qualified installer; you don't want someone who doesn't know what each wire does mucking about with the electrical innards of a gasoline pump. There isn't a huge supply of trained gas pump upgraders. There are many pump variations, and some can't be upgraded at all. Gas pumps often don't have an Internet connection, just a 2-wire twisted pair running RS-422 or something. The chip card readers, inevitably, want full Internet connectivity. Which means getting CAT-5 out to the pump. Which sometimes runs into CAT-5 length limitations. The older systems sometimes worked over dial-up. Average cost per pump is about $6,000.

Gilbarco/Veeder-Root has a product which is basically a pair of DSL modems to allow using the existing 2-wire connection to carry the Internet out to the pump.[1] Amusingly, they'll give you this for free if you buy their product for running ads on the pump.

And, of course, it's all "cloud-enabled".

And that's why there's such a holdup.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtMxhmJh8V0

Gas stations also have a disincentive to have you pay at the pump. They want you to walk in and buy from the mini-market, at least here in Australia the petrol was a loss-leader for a long time. They made all their money from the in store mini-market. All petrol stations here are essentially convenience stores with a gas station attached to get you in the door.

We have had pay at the pump before, but they got rid of it, and even brand new stations don't have it so it's not just upgrading the pumps.

This may be the case in Australia, but it's very much not in the US. Pay-at-pump is ubiquitous. Barring outliers like Oregon, people are not used to having to interact with another person or walk away from their cars in the process of filling up their tanks. Gas stations do tend to have colocated convenience stores, but going in one is an optional part of the experience.

In the US, it's much more the norm to start the fuel running, then go inside and buy whatever you need, and come back out to find that your car is full and you can simply drive off. Do Australian pumps not have the little latch to allow fuel to keep running without someone squeezing the handle the entire time?

Too many stations in my area of the US (western Ohio) allow this. I was a cashier at my family's independent gas station for a number of years, and it always pissed off customers when we stopped the dispenser when they walked away / got in their car / etc. It's a legitimate safety and environmental hazard (some hold-open latches don't disengage reliably on some filler necks leading to gasoline rolling out of the tank onto the ground). People get used to lax non-safety conscious stations and then act like jerks to the employees in stations who do care.

Yeah you're not allowed to leave the pump running unattended as far as I know, you have to hold down the pump at all gas stations I've been to.

This should be a good incentive for "gas stations" to set up and maintain SAE CCS DC Fast charging for electric vehicles. Put a couple of small tables and a cafe, and people would stick around for the 30 minutes to get a good charge.

That was the premise for CHAdeMO. Stop and have a cup of coffee and read the paper in a Starbucks-esque environment. Perhaps even mingle with one's fellow man.

I don't think it will really work outside of very specific demographics who a.) want to get coffee and read the paper/rss feeds, and b.) have 30 minutes to spend on a charge-centric event (as in you went there to charge, not to get coffee and croissant).

A lot of gas stations now have a screen on the pump that plays ads at you to make up for the fact that you're not coming in. Fortunately there's a mute button and it usually works.

I wonder why there isn't a "Buy now" button, they're already charging your credit card, they'd just need to hire someone to run the item from inside the store to you at your car. Add some sensors like body temperature monitoring; Sweating person who looks like they like their sweets? "5% off this ice cream if you hit 'Buy!' within the next 30 seconds!".

Damn, I think this is an idea. At least for developing countries, were labor is cheap, the runner is the expensive part of this concept.

This isn’t the case in Tasmania, since nearly nothing is open here 24hrs almost all fuel stations have a pay station located by the building, rather than at each pump.

Recently one independent has built a few fuel only prepaid only fuel stops, no minimart and no staff.

In Europe (Scandinavia at least), Gas stations use contactless, and most gas/oil companies have a dedicated app (think loyalty card) that can also handle payment for you over the internet.

It uses GPS, so when you open the app at a gas station it already knows where you are, and simply asks you which pump you want to unlock.

Installing gas station spyware sounds to fill up sounds like hell.

It only knows your location when you open the app, why is that a problem?

I assume they will require an account of some sort, and their DB will inevitably be breached to leak it who knows where. It knows more about me than my location. Probably. I don't know what all the proprietary software running on my portable sensor suite does or knows.

And almost without fail corporate one-off apps are bloated piles of contracted out and barely maintained garbage taking up too much space when a couple of forms and a few Mb of graphics/logos would do. Lastly very few actually work well or reliably, logging me out after needless updates seems to be a common pattern.

They require an account yes, but don’t kid yourself, every time you use a credit card to purchase something, your habits are being tracked by the merchant, using your very identifiable card number.

As for garbage apps, the one I use is well maintained, 53.7 MB binary, so not much on the side of tracking considering it contains ALL of their gas stations with pump details, paid parking lots and car washes. I had to check if it actually used an account, because I don’t remember ever signing in to it.

So good apps do exist.

It's probably not a problem in a place like that with some kind of privacy regulation. Import the concept to the US and it'll be outsourced to some company with sketchy security that'll find all its user data leaked in a year because they'll face no social, economic, or legal consequences for not preventing it. If they're not selling the data themselves.

Both of which will still require pumps to be replaced.

It never occurred to me how much infrastructure there was in a gas station. Talking about the 99% invisible, really.

That’s a great answer. My observation (watching from a card issuer across the pond) has been that it’s also integrated checkout/POS infrastructure at a number of large retailers - supermarkets, department stores, pharmacies as well as automated fuel dispensers and ATM†. The USA lagged for probably 15 years before there was any significant penetration of chip + PIN and contactless payments. Once the first large retailer replaced its fleet in ~2017 it’s been accelerating.

Since the USA makes up fully half of global card payments, MC and Visa were never going to ditch mag stripe until there was 80% penetration.

†Many AFDs seem to be configured to reject international cards which may explain why they’re not well represented in my sample set.

That's interesting, maybe we adopted contactless payments faster in part because in our gas stations you'd usually pay inside the shop. I have to think that was only one of many reasons, though.

Partly that, and the USA's much higher car dependence in general. I'd wager the average adult in the USA spends more time in a petrol station than the average European.

Quick googling gave me average US car consumption 25 mpg vs 57 mpg in EU.

Edit: Bad googling, sorry. 57 mpg was proposed for new cars.

Hmm, I wasn't even thinking about fuel efficiency, but that's interesting.

I meant, for anyone that missed it, that commuting by bus/train/tram/metro is much more common in urban areas in Europe than in the USA.

Compound that with driving more and it's a lot more time spent filling up.

Wow! Average 57 mpg in Europe - really? Even for diesels, that sounds extremely optimistic; is that from manufacturer-supplied figures?

US gallons happen to be smaller too, fwiw

Well, my 7 years old Mercedes A 180 CDI 2012 model (Diesel engine) averages 53 mpg (4.4 l/100Km) still today (see my old comment with all the details for the these numbers at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14552816). The manufacturer-supplied official numbers are even better (3.3 to 3.6 l/100Km, or about 65 to 71 mpg).

NB: the above mpg numbers are computed using US gallons (3.785 litres)

Useful economy figures, for sure. It's the average across Europe that I'd find really surprising, given how many older vehicles there will be, and not all diesels

The fuel dispenser industry, from an IT perspective, is a racket. My family owns a small independent gas station and recently did a POS replacement. The proprietary protocols for communicating to dispensers and controllers makes for crazy vendor lock-in and ridiculous installation fees, hardware prices, and ongoing support fees.

Super smart, yeah. BTW if we're gonna replace tons of gas pumps, can we make it illegal to play TV/ads on them? Lord I hate it so much.

Try the buttons around the display. That almost always solves the problem. If none of them work, stop pumping gas and leave. That always solves the problem.

That's not a problem. We should be leaving oil anyway, so upgrading infrastructure is useless.

</cynical>

Also some retail places. Home Depot is a huge retailer in the USA, but they will not accept contactless payments. I assume it has something to do with having to pay a higher percent per transaction.

The dumb thing is they have the tech to do it - when they rolled out their new chip readers several years ago, I was in a store where they had accidentally left the contactless reader on for a day or two, and was able to use ApplePay.

Next time I went back the reader just feigned ignorance.

Wormhole attack? Not sure if this is still a possibility though as distance base timeouts could be employed.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.10623.pdf

Contactless is not more expensive per transaction.

Initially only “credit” networks like Visa/MC supported tap to pay with interchange fees of 1 to 2.5%. The low fee debit networks did not. Regulated debit is as cheap as 21c + 0.05%. A lot of retailers have thin profit margins of 5%. So contactless adoption would mean more high interchange “credit” transactions and fewer low interchange debit transactions. Thus the retailer resistance to contactless.

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