Hacker News Reader

Comment by Hypx_ | Hacker News Reader

In the Northeast, people often use fuel oil delivered to their house for heating. Except that this fuel oil is basically diesel/kerosene, meaning we already had a system of delivery fuel to people's houses. And yet there was never an outcry for home refueling for their cars. It clearly wasn't something that people wanted even when they had it. So it's hard to see why now all of a sudden this is a real selling point.

View on HN

Probably because the idea of "you have to be home with the car waiting for the fuel guy to turn up" destroys a lot of the convenience, and the fact that car fuel tanks are more than 15 times smaller than typical heating oil tanks means you'd be paying a lot more overhead.

You have a big tank of fuel that can be stored up until you need it. It also takes a few minutes, not the hours you have to wait until a battery is full.

I don't see how this follows as a response to the previous comment.

(The time required by home charging is not particularly relevant if it's happening while you're sleeping or the car is otherwise idle, anyway).

To clarify: Considering how popular it is to get other frequently-used consumables home delivered, like food and alcohol, it is on the face of it somewhat surprising that the same is not true of liquid vehicle fuel. My prior comment was suggesting some possible reasons this might be so.

Thinking through it some more, the objection around the vehicle needing to be home at the time the delivery is made can be overcome by having the deliveries made late at night, as long as there was some way to give the delivery driver access to the car's fuel tank. At the end of the day it may just be too inefficient to have liquid fuel delivered weekly in 30-60 litre quantities, the overhead being too great.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com