Oregon expands electric vehicle charging statewide | Hacker News Reader

Oregon expands electric vehicle charging statewide

kgw.com

111 pointsclouddrover154 comments

I live in Oregon, and I went for long drive last weekend. I tried to charge twice at Electrify America charging stations... and both had lines of people waiting!

I will appreciate this.

I did pledge years ago that my next car was going to be electric only, but now there are a bunch of 30+ mile plugin hybrids, and some of these stories about chargers make it sound like it hasn't gotten any better than when I had my Leaf about 8 years ago. Maybe I want to use gas for road trips and electric for everything else...

I used to feel that way, then I got an electric car with a 250 mile range last year. I really have not felt the desire to ever have a gasoline car since. Hybrids have so many more parts needed, that I feel like they will simply have more problems long term. In an EV, there's not much that will ever need to get replaced due to "wear" other than tires and brakes.

As for charging, this last weekend was the first time I've ever had a problem finding a charger on 300 mile days. Most people I know don't even go on as many long drives as I do, as I enjoy driving for driving sake.

I have zero plans on gasoline ever again.

Same here. The little extra time I spend on the road trip we make twice or three times a year to grandma's house is more than offset by the 10 minutes a week I don't spend putting gas in. I never want to give up home fueling.

The lifespans of cars have little to with the power train. Any post-2000 car is capable of about 200-400k miles.

After that, wear and tear takes its toll. I live in the northeast, where salt and other factors takes you to the lower end. As an example, I drove a 2003 Honda Pilot for 260k miles. I made the decision to get rid of it as the suspension and frame rust made repairs far in excess of the value of the car.

Electric cars are the classic capital vs operational expense discussion. More expensive to buy, sometimes cheaper to own.

I hate seeing people say things like this with zero data to back it up. With a few exceptions, less than 5% of cars reach 200k miles [1].

[1] https://www.iseecars.com/longest-lasting-cars-study#v=2022

A lot of cars get totaled. My car would’ve made it to 200k but someone ran into it at 196k. Due to depreciation and mileage - it was a full write off after that crash.

For reference, I could still drive the car after the crash just barely. It would’ve been a lot of work to fix but on a 50k car, it might’ve been worth it. On a 5k car? No.

Right now the Ford F150 lightening base - $7500 tax credit nearly == the base ICE F150.

Minus gasoline volatility. (volatility has a price, just ask wall street options dealers) Minus repairs. Minus damage to environment.

It would be interesting to see any data on the reasons why cars are scrapped. I have a hunch that electronic problems make up a large percentage of them, along with rust.

Biggest reason is risk and loans.

Cars typically have pretty predictable depreciation schedule but after you hit a certain point the car could be worth anywhere from scrap value to a few thousand dollars. Few banks are going to write a loan for a 10 year old car, insurance valuations may not cover the loan value in the event of loss and few qualified customers are in the market for an old car.

As a result, you’re limited to cash buyers and parts buyers. Cars that meet whatever the cash buyers value are worth a lot. Even minor variances from whatever the car/truck guys want will take the value from $5-7k to scrap.

State regulations have an impact as well. In New York, all check engine light issues make inspection/registration a no-go. Many repairs exceed the value of a new car. In a place where the state doesn’t do inspections, you can run a beater longer. That circles back to the finance issue - banks won’t write loans for cars that may be pulled off the road.

> Hybrids have so many more parts needed, that I feel like they will simply have more problems long term.

Hybrids are well tested technology. Both Toyota and Honda have been producing hybrids for over 20-25 years now. We had a Prius that worked flawlessly for over 250K miles, before it had to be retired when its catalytic converter was stolen.

I'm not positive that a hybrid is actually that much more complicated than a traditional drive train with an engine + automatic transmission.

It isn't. There's a transfer case between the electric drive and the gasoline engine. It's not that complicated, basically a planetary gear mechanism, and is pretty rugged and trouble-free.

Exactly. In fact hybrid is easier on the ICE since it takes a lot of load while starting the car and during acceleration. So, they, IMHO, have longer life than just ICE cars.

Agreeing with others, it might be less complicated.

With the generally accepted drive train (pioneered by Toyota, and adopted by everyone else), there's two electric motors instead of one, but the gearing between the engine, the two motors, and the output shaft is fixed. There's no transmission actuators to break (other than the park pawl, but that's pretty simple). You can still have problems of course, Ford messed up something on early HF35 transmissions and many of them have bearings fail, leading to a short service life (mine was covered under warranty, so now I've got a new transmission).

Is THS-like hybrid system now common? For Japanese manufacturers, only Toyota uses THS-like system. AFAIK Germans too. I've researched past for my curiosity, but it seems that parallel-hybrid is more common for worldwide. Chrysler Pacifica also looks like THS-like. I wish manufacturers open how system work.

This article covers well (Japanese but figures are English so not block machine translation). https://anopara.net/2016/03/11/%E5%90%84%E7%A4%BE%E3%81%AE%E...

I found is also somewhat hard to get good info on these systems. It's colored by knowing they are five/six axis machines[1] where you have one or more motors controlling an axis.

A three axis machine is a triangle. Think three linkages pinned. Not very interesting. But a four axis machine is a simple gear train like you have with most battery powered cars. A five axis machine requires two inputs to define the motion of the remaining free axis. Far as I can tell that's what the original Toyota's used. Engine + Motor1 on one input. M2 on the ring gear. Drive shaft is the remaining.

Lot of different ways to skin that cat and they can look mechanically very different.

I thought Honda mostly switched to THS-like sometime mid 200x? I know their early stuff wasn't and you could get a manual transmission Honda Civic Hybrid, but I had rwad that they switched.

Looks like Hyundai/Kia aren't though. And I wasn't able to get a good read on a lot of them. I guess I over generalized from Toyota, Honda, Ford, and Chrysler.

AFAIK there's no THS-like Honda cars. Nissan and Mazda bought THS system from Toyota and sold small amount of cars only once.

I mean, this[1] sounds like THS, mostly. I don't think THS (or Ford) use any clutches though.

[1] https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a15121345/honda-accord-...

It's just early i-MMD (basically series-hybrid, but also can drive directly by engine on highway) system, according to PR, despite they said "eCVT". It's confusing. They called two motor(generator) connected via electricity (but not connected mechanically) as "eCVT". It uses clutch to switch direct drive on highway. https://global.honda/newsroom/news/2013/4130620eng-accord.ht...

THS is very matured but Honda switches their hybrid technology a few times so not like Toyota.

Same, although the very rare road trip is more annoying. I can always rent an ICE in these situations. Totally worth it otherwise, especially as I watch fuel prices go up.

Yeah, if you get unlimited miles, it makes A LOT of sense to rent. I've done weekend trips covering 1000km and wondered that I should have rented for the weekend because it would be more economical to put the meterage on vehicle that isn't my own. Plus if I have a mechanical issue, it's the rental companies problem, not mine.

Genuine question: is the use of “meterage” the common/standard way to refer to the total distance a car has traveled (as we would use “mileage” in the US)?

No; but I want it to be

Here's an upvote and a high-five for using civilized units!

EVs have plenty of mechanical parts that are not brakes and wheels. It will need servicing, just of a different sort.

The point is that they have much fewer of them, not that they have none.

Not having to withstand thousands of explosions per minute (whatever RPM the engine is turning at, times the number of pistons in the engine) as a requirement is an extreme advantage.

Modern combustion engines are very robust and usually not any significant source of failure. Cars on the verge of being scrapped have everything else wrong — rust, suspension, ac lines, electronics, locks, windows, lights, etc etc.

Engine failure is a non-event. Since efficiency and emissions standards raised the bar on engine design and tolerances, even the cheapest engine is reliable.

Hell, I bought a lawn mower that had a 5 year warranty that the mower would start on the first pull.

I had a 2006 Cadillac CTS that had to get the engine rebuilt (btw, very comfortable cars, but they're basically garbage made out of styrofoam). I know it's infrequent, but it happens.

And either way, the issue isn't just with the engine-- having an ICE means you need to make a bunch of design choices you wouldn't otherwise have made, you're forced to use certain materials over others, you're forced to account for all sorts of material stress and vibrations, your centre of mass is quite high, you have a lot of weight on the front tires, etc etc. All of these other problems more or less come with the engine.

There's also transmission and gearbox design, etc.

Sure. My sister had a defective Subaru that was a similar story. I believe that car had 3 engines due to some issue with that model year.

Those are the exceptions that prove the rule. They are rare and more indicators of process failures than some fundamental engineering problem.

Mine was first or second, so they kind of padded themselves in the marketing. The only time I've had it take more than 1 or 2 was when I needed to clean the fuel line. After that, right back to 1 or 2. It's now 8 years old

Gasoline in engines deflagrates, it does not detonate.

That may be, but does it change anything I said?

It's not a 1:1. ICE has things like: belts (less so now), exhaust, cooling that goes all over the place, vibration, fuel handling (injectors, lines, pump, sometimes more than one pump!), air handling with intakes and filters, sensors for all that junk (oxygen, MAF), oil and oil routing if there's a cooler, transmission cooler in some cases. Lots of these subsystems are total deletions in electric cars.

I'm not saying mechanics will go obsolete, but you're not going to see nearly as many of them. There's simply less to go wrong. I'm sure that something that goes wrong will be on the order of 10k~ :D.

I don't have it at hand, but there was a picture of the frame containing non-drive train components for the Model S, and it was maybe 2ft by 2ft.

A peek at the front of a model S skateboard: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/df/d1/50/dfd15057c8b5a4d129e91ec3b...

It's not the same cardinality.

The reason most dealerships don't want to sell EVs is that they make most of their income from servicing the cars.

New ICE cars don’t need any kind of servicing for two years either. It wouldn’t be much a change for them.

No fluids changed for two years? TIL

Not according to the manual, no. Two years or like 20k miles in modern cars.

I have not had to service my 5 year old EV yet. Only expense has been tires and a (standard) car battery replacement

You haven’t had to service it, except for the things where you had to service it? ICE cars also don’t need much servicing in their first five years, except for a couple of oil changes.

The Toyota HSD has had remarkably good service life and results across almost 20 years now. Is it going to be 100% as good as a BEV? Probably not. Would I bet on it economically reaching 250K miles without major drama? I would.

> other than tires and brakes

And batteries.

I'm not claiming for a second that the cadence of swapping batteries is going to be anything like all the consumable filters and gaskets, transmissions, bearings, etc but when the day comes to replace seven thousand 18650 cells in one go, it's going to sting.

On the plus side, that's another 15y on the road.

I have a Chrysler Pacifica plug-in hybrid. For my use case it is absolutely perfect. It gets about 30 miles of range on a charge which is more than enough for dropping the kids off at school and running errands around town. The battery charges just fine overnight from a regular 120V outlet so there’s no need to upgrade the power in the garage. And the occasional road trip is super easy.

> Maybe I want to use gas for road trips and electric for everything else...

This is effectively my setup. Got an SUV for all those bigger, longer hauls, and a little 60-90 mile range VW eGolf for "around the town" trips.

This weekend we used the SUV and filled up for the first time in about 1-1.5 months and couldn't believe my eyes when I saw $75 after the pump stopped.

Unfortunately, I just don't feel comfortable without having a fuel based option in the garage. Although the new F-150 lightning with range-extender (only a patent atm) and a price drop (yeah right) might convince me otherwise.

I have had a tesla for 3 years and have never had a problem at the supercharger even once

If you don't go on longer road trips very often then maybe just rent a car when you need one for a road trip.

I know this forum is chock full of Tesla drivers, but cars are the ultimate blight on the planet. Electric cars aren't good for the environment, especially when supporting them with highways, charging stations, maintenance etc. I can't help but think what would happen if every public dollar spent on EV infrastructure was spent on reducing car dependence instead. Every dollar put towards cars is like technical debt but for infrastructure. It's immature.

$100M in buses and dense housing would be so much better. You'd think a state like Oregon would be able to figure this one out too.

I've always seen this as an opportunity to fix the problem that is cars.

I get what you're saying and agree in theory, but there are a couple of issues that I take with a couple of those assertions...

EVs aren't good for the environment, but they're better and will get better for the environment at scale. Recycling/chemistry will improve, petroleum bi-products dependencies reduced, so on.

We would still need most of the same infrastructure for buses, trucks, delivery vehicles, although all that extra torque and battery weight is going to make this a lot more expensive to maintain. But we're talking about increasing that torque and weight moving buses, trucks, etc to electric anyways.

I'm sure charging stations will be orders of magnitude better for the environment than gas stations (run-off, refueling trucks, idle-waiting, etc). We'll need this for all the buses, trucks, etc anyways.

Maybe most importantly in my eyes will be time-sharing vehicles, although not restricted to EVs. There is a chance that in the future that we'll get by with fewer cars on the road by sharing them. Most cars sit around doing nothing for most of the year. Imagine how much concrete, plastic, metal, money... might be saved by just doubling a vehicle's utilization. Imagine 3X, 4X,...

Unfortunately/fortunately, the car has become an integral part of our ecomony and way of life. I think we're decades, if not a century away from being able to replace them.

I agree almost entirely. I am open-minded to the idea that there's some amount of transition-to-electric that is positive, but it's entirely in terms of the counterfactual question. Are we switching gas to electric (which itself isn't entirely helpful in every respect but definitely net helpful) or keeping private cars when we'd otherwise be moving away from private cars? Surely it's a mix. But given that we have limited resources, we should be pushing almost entirely on the move away from car-dependency, so to the extent that electric car funding is taking away from that, it's a bad thing.

Electric cars are not a solution to enough of our problems, and they are indeed enabling the continuation of most of everything terrible about car-dependent planning.

FWIW, the best resources for these topics I urge everyone to check out are r/fuckcars and YouTube channel NotJustBikes and the non-profit Strong Towns (all of which are actually not just knee-jerk anti-car incidentally)

Right; they're likely better for the environment than ICE cars (certainly in terms of direct carbon emissions), but they're still not good for the environment or for us. For example, tire dust alone is still an issue whether the cars are electric or not:

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2019-10-02/califor...

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171215105310.h...

Cities need to be thinking more about how they can make it more possible for people to get around without a car in the first place.

I hear you, but after COVID public transit is essentially dead in the US. It was barely funded to start with, but now that pandemic showed us the government could essentially turn off your ability to move… yeah no way.

People don't all live in one place, and the perfect is the enemy of the good.

> every public dollar spent on EV infrastructure was spent on reducing car dependence instead

In comparison to transit funding, road costs, or even housing subsidies in cities for the poor, spending on EV infrastructure is a rounding error.

I'm looking forward to the day that electric vehicle charging infrastructure starts charging time of day rates. Or market rates, ie: take what you get rates.

Oregon has a lot of hydroelectricity, but a lot of nat gas too, and I'm assuming the hydro is the cheapest rate but only 100% at night time.

This will have a lot of unintended dystopian consequences too. Rich people won't care or notice how much power they use when but poor people will be strongly impacted and have to spend disproportionately more of their time managing electricity usage. I'm ok paying a few extra cents so that the old lady down the road doesn't have to wonder whether or not she can afford to make tea now or she should wait until 1am.

Another way to think about this is that people who are cost conscious cannot adjust their schedules to save money. They're forced to pay rates rates that aren't just daily average rates, they're averages weighted based on when customers without price signal incentives would like to use energy. If you want to help the old lady down the street, removing this cost signal has to be one of the most expensive ways possible.

> Another way to think about this is that people who are cost conscious cannot adjust their schedules to save money.

Huh? cost conscious people cannot adjust their schedule? Then they're not really cost conscious are they, otherwise they would! "I'm a cost conscious person, and I want to go to Hawaii.. TOMORROW! oh, the flight is 3k.. well, I'm not changing my schedule" Cost conscious people are masters of adjusting their schedule to save money. They'll buy the flight that leaves Tuesday and comes back Thursday to save 30 bucks.

It’s more like “I need to be at work at 8AM”. Or “the kids need to be at school at 7:43”.

Leaving the house at 4AM to save 20% on electricity isn’t gonna work.

There's some confusion here - GP was arguing against time-of-use rates. I wanted to highlight the irrationality of that argument. Rather I should have written "Another way to think about [your proposal against TOU] is..."

Arguably, those that can change their timing makes it cheaper for those that can’t.

Electric cars are for rich people anyway. Time-of-use billing is the least of the barriers to letting normal people use them viably in a way that lets them get the same benefit as all my neighbors who have Teslas and also a Suburban to take ontoad trips. Charging people based on supply and demand generally has a better outcome for everyone than trying to mandate economics.

Yes, this current crop of vehicles is still on the high even of what a middle-class family might spend on a car, calling the for the rich is an exaggeration. If you only look at Teslas and Porches you are not seeing the complete picture. You’ve also got Hyundais, Kira, Fords, and Chevys at lower prices. The next round of vehicles promise to be less expensive. New cars have always been hard to afford for the lowest incomes but as sales volumes increase, that means a large supply of used cars start to become available.

I've come to understand that when I hear this "EVs are for the rich" argument, it's not about the cost of the vehicle. Or at least that's not really the issue today (just as you suggested, we bought an immaculate used eGolf with low miles for ~16k).

One of the most expensive parts of owning an EV is the charging part. If you don't have your own charging point, you probably need to forget about EVs if you're in the market for a car. Sure there are people that make it work by charging at work or live in an apartment complex with a couple of community chargers, but for most people with kids just trying to make ends meet, etc... it just isn't worth the extra hassle.

Lots of parts of the US already have time-of-day electricity rates.

Market rates does not mean higher rates!

> I'm looking forward to the day that electric vehicle charging infrastructure starts charging time of day rates.

Many of the Tesla super chargers in the Bay Area and Central Coast have this feature.

That said, a few of them changed to 24-hour rates during the recent price increase.

And all EVgo stations in California.

For home EV charging, Georgia Power already does this. 11pm-7am is $0.01/kwh. At the other extreme, on weekdays in the summer between 2pm and 7pm, the cost is $0.20/kwh. All other times EV charging is $0.07/kwh.

If your driving habits are such that you can top off your battery within the eight hour window each night, it's nearly free energy.

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr... has the data on the entire Northwest region, including Oregon. Hydro does seem to be about a bit less than half of total generation the majority of the time, including in the middle of the night.

I just switched my Portland electric plan to time of day billing. It’s 33c per kWh from 5-9pm and 7c all other hours. The idea is to minimize the number of natural gas peaker plants they need running as the sun goes down.

What was your reason for switching? Did you get a home battery pack that charges overnight? Assuming you have electric appliances, start cooking meals and taking showers from 9pm to 5am?

A good number of rural Oregon gas stations still follow the “park, walk in, give the cashier a $20 bill, go out and pump until the mechanical dial says “20”, then drive off” honor system.

Interested to see if those ancient pumps will now be accompanied by some new fangled electric thing.

Ugh, I've experienced systems that require pre-pay, so you go in and give $20 and the pump runs at a snail's pace from $19.50 onward just to make sure you don't get $20.01

That 0.01 matters to them. A few years ago most gas stations had replaced those electronic price displays to show 3 digits after comma: the subtle scam of 3.99 prices cost them a cent, which adds up, and now it costs them only 0.1 cent.

A colleague told me of a gas station that found after many years, that they had sold more gas than they had bought. Eventually they realized that it was because their tanks were filled up at night, when gas was cooler/less voluminous than when it was pumped out in the heat of the day (it was in the central valley of CA, which gets very hot).

I've long thought that fuel should be sold by mass rather than volume.

Fun story: I live in very rural Oregon and a few years ago a friend bought an all electric for use around town. He had to bring it to town with a truck and trailer because it didn’t have near enough range to get here on its own. Works out great for him though.

The additional charging coverage contemplated by the article would have let him drive it home.

I have a low level of confidence in the state of Oregon being capable of pulling this off.

'Oregon has yet to spend nearly $300 million in tax revenue set aside for substance abuse treatment and recovery services under a voter-approved law intended to transform the state’s response to addiction.

So far not a single new treatment bed has been funded since Measure 110′s passage to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of heroin and other street drugs and set up a system to refer and treat those suffering from addiction.

By law, a citizen-led council is in charge of overseeing the distribution of the money to drug treatment and treatment-related services.

Originally, funding was supposed to start flowing to local organizations by the end of last year'.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/total-chaos-delays-dog-ore...

Much as everyone hates big oil they have an excellent supply chain track record and fully functional gas stations. Having a state like Oregon with its complicated energy supply house of cards organize this is asking for trouble, before you even get to the brave new world of squeezing 100Kwh into BEVS.

https://www.oregon.gov/energy/energy-oregon/Pages/Oregon-Uti...

I've had real "range anxiety" even in ICE cars in Oregon. It's not hard to be 100 miles from a gas station on some of the backwoods logging roads. Combine that with occasional road blockages (trees, rocks), and it can get dicey.

Are you allowed to plug in your own car in Oregon? Or do you have to let the attendant do it?

The more electrified infrastructure the better! Glad for Oregon.

Did the government also fund the construction of gas stations when cars were getting started?

Governments the world over subsidize petroleum and other fossil fuel industries:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesellsmoor/2019/06/15/united...

https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/climate-change/energy-subsidie...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...

Governments fund the roads to drive the cars on in the first place (roads, bridges, road signs, traffic lights, street cleaning, etc.). A bit of extra funding for building EV charging infrastructure is not disproportionate.

I'm asking about gas stations specifically. Of course, governments do and should continue building electric grid infrastructure

https://www.convenience.org/Topics/Fuels/The-History-of-Fuel... quite interesting, the way the petroleum supply chain grew. Monopolies broken up but no government grants etc to speak of

If we're talking government funded car infrastructure... yeah I think a lot of that happened, and continues to, unfortunately.

Are you allowed to charge your own electric vehicle in Oregon, or are attendants required as they are at gas stations?

Oh you.

In all seriousness, charging a car is far safer than filling it with gas; no attendants needed!

* so long as you believe the premise of the law

The first time I filled up in Oregon after moving into the state, the attendant pulled the nozzle out of my truck while it was still filling up. Gas all over my truck and the ground. The manager came up and apologized, saying it was his first day on the job. The kid was probably still in high school, and the first day he ever had to fill a car up.

And there I was sitting in my truck realizing I had about over 25 years "job" experience for what this kid was doing, and I had never done that.

Yeah its a bit ironic. I remember being a young kid and my dad showing me how to pump gas. I assume that's normal for everyone outside Oregon and (New Jersey?). It's funny that such a common thing is somehow a rare piece of knowledge in some places. Reminds me of the story of Newton (or some other deep thinking mathematician) going somewhere and realizing he didn't know how to butter toast.

Edit: I looked it up, the toast story is Erdős

http://www.fang.ece.ufl.edu/erdos.html

I hear these stories all the time from people, and don’t doubt this happened to you but I have lived in Oregon almost my whole life and this has never happened to me or anyone I personally know.

Of course it would never happen to you. You grew up in OR, so you never tried to pump your own gas. That situation only happens to people from out of state who come to OR and start pumping their own gas, not knowing the law against it.

The premise of the law is a jobs program, is it not?

No one could reasonably look at the other 48.5 states and conclude that self-service fueling is dangerous. They could reasonably say “we want to structure fueling to protect bullshit jobs.”

The premise of the law is safety, or at least it was when it was enacted generations ago. It’s function is as a jobs program though.

I think if you look at insurance costs, you could find the answer to whether or not self-service fueling is more dangerous or not.

Or you could answer whether insurance is rent seeking that's parasitic on society. I don't know the details so could be wrong, but if insurance is mandated by government and supplied by an oligopoly, it's fees don't necessarily reflect the actual risk involved. It's easy to see comparisons of different health/car insurance costs across jurisdictions to see that.

Well, yes, I think if that's how you feel about insurance and the supposed lack of a functioning free market, you have to resolve that question first before using it as an indication of actual risk.

It’s a valid question — I was wondering the same.

Makes me wonder: Is fuel in Oregon more expensive than surrounding states because of this (after accounting for diffential fuel taxes and labor costs)?

Or does the cost just get absorbed into the supplier chain and cost consumers nothing while creating a few jobs in the process?

I grew up in Oregon, and my real first job was as a gas station attendant. In my experience, fuel was more expensive in Washington, Idaho, and California (all the surrounding states). So while it doesn’t make the fuel more expensive, it does make running a gas station more labor intensive. Of course we know how corporations feel about having to put up with labor!

I am looking at the Costco app and gas prices are $0.25 per gallon cheaper in Vancouver, WA compared to all the gas stations in and around Portland in Oregon.

Oregon gas tax is ~$0.38 per gallon ($0.10 extra in Portland). Washington is $0.494 per gallon.

The claim that labor costs for full service gas are not reflected in prices at the pump that customers pay for a low margin fungible good like gas is ridiculous to me. Even more trivial is the proof by way of 48 other states having no full service gas stations, with the only possible reason being that people do not want to pay the extra cost for someone else to fill their gas.

Or people would rather pump their own gas.

I live in Oregon, and usually I'd rather pump my own than wait for the attendant to start pumping, then wait again for them when pumping is done. I appreciate being able to do it myself on trips out of state (or in rural Oregon, where in some places self-service is now legal).

The average price of gas in Oregon is higher than in WA and ID, lower than CA.

Source: https://gasprices.aaa.com/

> Is fuel in Oregon more expensive than surrounding states

Nope. From what I hear, the increased cost of insurance for self-service is in the same ballpark as hiring a few attendants. So it's a wash.

The insurance cost being lower such that it offsets labor costs is obviously not true.

If it were true, then there would be a business opportunity in the other 48 states for a gas station to sell full service gas at the same price as others are selling self service at. But it never, ever occurs, so it is trivial to prove the labor costs are material and would result in higher gas prices that people are not willing to pay for.

If it's a wash economically, then self-service is still the better choice because it eliminates the other less-insurable risks that come with having employees.

Unfortunately there's no easy way to tell, because in the other 48 states, full service is considered a premium service and they charge extra for it because a certain segment of consumers will pay for it. That doesn't mean it's actually more expensive.

>full service is considered a premium service and they charge extra for it because a certain segment of consumers will pay for it.

This is disproven by the fact that in my 3+ decades of travel around many US states, I have never seen a gas station attendant outside of NJ and OR. No one is willing to pay the premium necessary to employ attendants, and so they will reward the gas station owner selling self serve for cheaper.

There certainly exists a population of people who would like to have others pump their gas for them. If gas station attendant labor costs made no effect on bottom line gas prices, then gas station owners would try to court these people by selling full service gas at the same price as self service.

Since it does not happen, the premise of negligible labor costs must be false.

The price of gas in Oregon is more expensive than in neighboring states, except California, due to increase taxes on fuel in that state. In general, taxes probably explain much more of the difference in gas costs than insurance does. I'm not an expert, but it's not clear to me why insurance would cost more for a self-service station than for a full service station, so if you have a source that explains this, I'd appreciate reading it.

> From what I hear, the increased cost of insurance for self-service is in the same ballpark as hiring a few attendants. So it's a wash.

Possible hypotheses:

1) Every single gas station in the US not in Oregon or New Jersey is run by complete idiots who can't figure out a way to make full service gas profitable despite the fact that "it's a wash."

2) What you heard is not correct.

Not sure I'm following you here. We're talking about the costs of doing business and how that might reflect in the retail price of gasoline. At this moment the price of gasoline in Washington is less than one penny different from Oregon. This whole discussion is hypothetical, of course, because there is a lot more that goes into the cost & price of gasoline than just employee wages and liability insurance. But to the original question of "is gas more expensive in Oregon?" the answer is "No."

> Not sure I'm following you here.

What I'm pointing out is that the issue is not that insurance and labor costs wash each other out, or the rest of the country would have more than zero full-service stations.

Here is a recent academic paper that models the cost of labor: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4064061

You charge it yourself. There’s no attendants at any chargers I’ve been to.

Damnit. I came here to make this same comment.

Are we going to end up overbuilding our EV infrastructure because people don’t intuitively grasp that most of their charging can be done at home?

Even if we overbuild EV chargers, it doesn’t seem nearly as bad as overbuilding gas stations. Abandoned gas stations turn into nasty environmental messes — tanks leak, things spilled on the ground soak in, etc. Abandobed EV chargers are parking spaces with smallish, harmless machines that may even have some scrap value.

> that may even have some scrap value.

Charging cables are already being scalped for copper unfortunately.

If we expect electric cars to replace all gas powered cars, we have to have places for all the apartment dwellers to charge, as well as for all the people who are driving on long trips.

Even with the limited number of Teslas on the road right now, I ended up having to wait for over an hour for a spot to charge while driving from Northern California to Southern California on a holiday weekend. The station had 40 superchargers and still had over and hour wait to get to them. If every single driver on I-5 had to stop to charge, you will need a LOT of charging stations.

If we expect electric cars to replace all gas powered cars, finally every parking for apartment must have slow charger, isn't it? I think this is easier, cheaper, efficient, and useful way than having supercharger everywhere. Supercharger at highway must be encouraged for long trip.

I would love to charge at home. My landlord doesn't quite agree.

I would love to own my own home.

In the meantime, I will accept other EV charging initiatives.

There's more use cases for vehicles than driving around a major city, I use my vehicle as more than a grocery fetcher. I routinely drive hundreds of miles, I'm routinely in remote areas, I really value freedom of movement. At the moment an EV is completely out of the question for me because the infrastructure isn't remotely close to what would support my use case. I guess if you want to convert more people to EVs you need to actually build out a system I'd be interested in using.

Once we have the vehicles and infrastructure to support the other 95% of the population, maybe things will be good enough that you might find an EV or similar for your needs.

> I'm routinely in remote areas

Are those remote areas clogged with your next door neighbors? Or are they mostly empty?

> you need to actually build out a system I'd be interested in using.

Nah. You're an (extreme) edge case.

> Nah. You're an (extreme) edge case.

False.

The average gas-powered car has a 300 mile range.

I drive to remote areas fairly often. I cannot get to these areas in my daily driver because I don't have enough range!

It's an extreme outlier scenario.

Sets of 4 chargers interspersed along major interstates and highways, which are exactly the settings (long hauls/roadtrips) where you really do need chargers away from home.

4 chargers per location?! That's not a good way to have reliability.

4 chargers per install. I'd assume multiple installs per location in some cases but not others.

That's pretty confusing. Chargers don't naturally come in multiples of 4. Sometime hardware is multiples of 1 or 2.

but they will bid out the entire install and possibly even design. Gas pumps come in multiples of 1 or 2 but gas station design & construction happens in larger units of pumps & aren't bid in a "pick any multiple of 1 or 2 pumps" way. Does that make sense?

It makes sense that there's an economy of scale, and standardized designs are good, but the number 4 doesn't seem to be special in any way.

Right, I don't think it's special, other than perhaps as "this is the absolute minimum of chargers we'd ever want to put in a single place, and we're good with multiples of 4".

Overbuilding? I regularly stop at highway rest stops to get gas and have to wait on line at an 8 pump gas station they takes minutes per fill. If people were using electric cars with similarly distributed infrastructure that took 1/2 hour or more to charge, it would be impossible to go anywhere. I don't understand how it moves from niche to mass adoption, but under the current system, I guess it involves an insane amount of chargers

Edit: my point above is that I'm talking about highway rest stops which are presumably exclusively frequented by people on long road trips. Maybe some started without a full tank, but the majority are gassing up to extend their range, and my point is that current infrastructure already gets bogged down with that despite the comparatively high speed of filling a gas tank.

Most EV owners will only need to charge at these types of chargers when on long road trips, which are likely to be infrequent (for most drivers). Overnight charging is all you need for any daily driving <300 miles.

Everybody needs to go to the gas station whether they are road tripping or a local. It’s not the same for EVs.

Everyone who owns a charger, most likely in a garage, attached to a single-family home is != everyone.

It’s a good point, that theoretically you’ll have fewer users at electric charging stations because individuals can self-charge. But when most homes don’t have an electric charger, and many will never have an electric charger, that might not be as big a difference as you think.

My last apartment was a very nice condo and there were two electric chargers in the basement. Not sure if I could rely on that for every day commuting needs.

> Everyone who owns a charger, most likely in a garage, attached to a single-family home is != everyone.

The majority of people in the US live in single family detached homes. While there are a significant number of people living in apartments or condos, we have a long ways to go before that's going to limit adoption.

> most homes don’t have an electric charger

Every home has 120V sockets, and installing a 14-50 isn't cost prohibitive given how much you save in the first year alone compared to gasoline. The average person could charge every day with a bog standard 120V outlet and be fine. 14-50 is nice when you go on a road trip and want to recover full charge by the next morning, though.

I mean this sounds bad but also eminently fixable. Compared to, say, replacing a condo roof the problem of installing a few new chargers is about the most straightforward capital improvement you could imagine.

The comparison is not relevant because people don't fill their gas cars with gas at home.

An EV can leave the house every day at 100% charge.

And most people will stop at the gas station in their neighborhood before they get on the highway for a long trip. The experience at those interstate fueling stations is absolutely analogous.

Quite a few people don't live in detached SFHs. If your EV is leaving from an apartment, condo, townhouse, etc the charging story tends to be more complex .

My apartment complex already has chargers. Eventually most or all will.

In my area, we have an advantage in that even if your landlord doesn't want to install changing, they're legally required to let you install a charger if you want one and are willing to pay for it. However depending on your metering setup the cost can be anywhere from $5-15k

Only if they have a garage or somewhere to park overnight with charging

That's most people, but we do need to work on getting better solutions installed for the remainder.

> If people were using electric cars with similarly distributed infrastructure that took 1/2 hour or more to charge, it would be impossible to go anywhere.

This is a good point. The charging infrastructure seems to be ok to support EV requirements right now (I don’t think I have ever seen a charging station full), but with EV purchases increasing at some point this could be a problem. Without more infrastructure you have to resort to time limits to serve the need. This would be a problem.

Or continue to build out infrastructure

hopefully fast enough

We are currently far from overbuilding. Home charging is great and means we don't need EV chargers everywhere we currently have gas stations.

But highway chargers need to handle peak demand for highway travel, including holidays.

And we do need lots of slow chargers for those who can't install their own home charger. City street parking, offices, parking garages, apartment buildings, etc.

Better over than under. And if we overbuild, then just wait for the market to catch up to available capacity before building more.

Most isn’t all and a lot of places will be inaccessible if you don’t build out.

You're right. Especially in rural areas when you need the extra range.

I'd love to see some modeling of charging demand based on travel patterns. Something that takes into account trips that take into consideration trips that would be served by overnight home charging vs need for freestanding charging out in the wild.

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