Hacker News Reader

Gas stations typically had zero or near zero margins on gasoline itself and made money in the convenience stores, notably tobacco products.

EVs should be a great for their business. Level 3 / DC Fast should be too difficult for a lot of places to want to construct and maintain, should be more easy to site and permit than a gas station, should have less remediation problems, and have longer stops and high opportunities to upsell customers on food or other high margin retail goods or services.

This should be a goldmine for "filling" stations.

Exactly, this would actually be history repeating itself. The original "gas stations" were pharmacies that added a gas pump to bring in customers, sold at a price that didn't bring in much profit but got customers in the door.

That’s not at all the same. The example you provide was augmentation or expansion of their market/products. This is not that at all. At best it is a supplanting of the market with a clearly imposed and forced product and system.

Those are cleverly not free choices, they aren’t even just biased through subsidies; they are actively sabotaging and commanding major shifts in society and the economy, which has never gone well when it has ever been tried under any other communist, utopian, command economy, self-righteous system of a minority of conceited rulers imposing things on people unnaturally, based on pontifications emanating from ivory towers.

Dedicated, paid EV stations can also differentiate themselves by providing fast DC charging. This requires more expensive equipment and quite possibly an upgrade to the property's connection to the grid - something that probably isn't worth it to businesses just providing a few free level 1/2 chargers as a courtesy to customers.

I had never considered that EV charging places could cause arcades to be a thing again. That would be amazing.

Of course, the lower income people living in apartments who can afford the min. ~$60,000 EV will of course then spend even more at charging stations. Poor people should try not being poor, right?

I sometimes wonder if this whole EV thing will be known as the “let them eat cake” type of moment, capturing a sentiment of ruling strata detached from reality on the ground until their heads end up rolling around on it.

“Just buy a $60,000 EV”, tells the HN technocrat to someone who delivers them food to their $1M+ home, working for a delivery service that digs them deeper into a financial hole as millions more low wage foreign laborers stream into the country and inflation eats away at any progress that the HN technocrat has only benefited from.

Where are you getting this $60,000 number from?

- A Nissan LEAF costs $19,990 when taking the federal tax credit for purchasing a new electric vehicle

- VW ID.4 with the tax credit is $33.5K

- Kia Niro EV with the tax credit is $32.5K

- Hyundai Kona Electric with the tax credit is $26.5K

- Hyundai Ioniq 5 with the tax credit is $32.5K

- Chevy Bolt with no incentives is $26K

- Chevy Bolt EUV with no incentives is $27K

If you don't have any tax liability to take the federal tax credit, you can lease and the leasing company takes the credit and rolls the discount into the payments.

If demand drops a bit as the economy cools down, you will be able to buy used electric cars for cheap again as well.

I paid $7k for my EV, except actually I traded in my Prius and wrote a check for $27.

Not everybody buys new. Not everybody buys the more expensive models.

Entry level EVs exist that are under $30k USD new. Used EVs and Plug-in Hybrids exist that are under $20k USD.

I spend less on electricity for my Chevy Volt than I would for any combustion vehicle.

Sure, your example "low income people" won't be driving around in a brand new Tesla, but anyone who's buying power includes a $15k-30k vehicle can just as easily buy a plug-in hybrid or entry level EV.

It would be cheaper, easier, and much more desirable for the rental units to provide charging in their parking areas than for the gas stations to do it, though.

It's just a competition thing. Gas stations will never compete with a 240V outlet. There will never be an EV equivalent of an urban gas station (superchargers for distance travel are a real requirement though).

> since EV charging takes longer

This is an interesting second order factor for public charging. The critical part may not be cost of electricity but the extended parking space required. If a ICE refuel space is used for <10m and a EV recharge space is used for 30m then the station's total capacity was just cut in third.

Gas stations have a lot of space taken up by the pumps, bollards to prevent collisions with them, and traffic flow since most stops are only a few minutes. I expect a fully realized commercial charging station would look more like a Starbucks, parking lot and all. So probably a lot more dense.

This brings up the question - forget gas stations, what other businesses can leverage their omnipresence to become defacto "the charging spot" and increase their foot traffic commensurately?

The vast majority of Electrify America charging stations are in Walmart and Target parking lots. They are positioning themselves for that role already. When I take a road trip in my electric car, it can feel like a tour of Wal-Marts across America.

I figured broader decentralization-- every supermarket has 10 or 20 charging spots, every strip mall 2-5. There's a huge synergy there in that you've now got customers who may feel "I've got 30 minutes to kill, I'll buy another coffee/cycle around the store and pick up another impulse buy item."

There may easily be a point where subsidizing the charge to attract EV customers is a net positive for business.

Maybe. Some studies show up to 80% of EV charging in the US is done at home. So demand is way lower.

That's partly because it's hard for apartment/condo users to charge EVs, so they buy them less compared to home owners or renters, and thus underrepresented in your stats in spite of demand for EVs among them. It's a classic chicken and egg problem.

My personal belief is that condos will apartment/condos will start installing chargers as both a differentiator and through incentives.

My own experience is that I refused to sign a lease in 2019 until an outlet was available and the landlord installed one.

It will be like pet friendly apartments.

Not every apartment is pet friendly. Not every apartment can have an electric charger.

I agree that it’s going to get a lot more common at apartments but won’t apply to everyone. My last apartment had a massive garage with electric charging. It was $400/mo. My current apartment doesn’t have anything beyond street parking which definitely has no electric charging spots.

Careful with taking that number at face value. For the longest time the EV market was an upper-class market, so first adopters most likely were people who are wealthy enough to have their own home and thus the option to install their own chargers, particularly as the charging networks weren't really in place yet 10 years ago.

But over time that % is bound to shift heavily as EVs become more affordable, the charging networks become more dense, and more people, who don't own their own property, get into the market.

This will very likely increase demand for "not at home" charging, particularly considering how in many urban places people already struggle with finding a place to park, let alone one with a charger.

But most people charging at a gas station will be mostly apartment dwellers that don't have EV charging in their nightly parking spots yet. Home owners or renters can charge at home most of the time. The gas station charging eliminates range anxiety for them and helps EVs with smaller batteries and shorter ranges like the Leaf. Even for the apartment dwellers, there will be more and more EV chargers at parking spots near grocery stores, malls, movie theaters, amusement parks, offices etc.

> Gas stations can install non-free EV charging stations right now, and it will actually increase their non-gas business since EV charging takes longer, so the customer is incentivised to shop the convenience store to stretch their legs

But those apartment dwellers probably won't do that if there's a nearby restaurant with free EV charging stations, which appear to be exactly what this bill is outlawing.

To me, this bill seems to designed to make the plan you outlined more likely to actually work for gas station owners.

FWIW, free EV charging stations are often incredibly slow, on the order of 7 kW. At that rate, it would take over 10 hours to completely recharge a Model 3.

People with BEVs don't use free charging stations for their daily driving unless the charger is at work. They're typically not going to leave their car plugged in at the grocery store for 4+ hours.

They also won't do it if there's public transit, but that's already been defunded.

> They also won't do it if there's public transit, but that's already been defunded.

What does that have to do with gas station owners and their families, and helping them transition as technology changes?

Also, public transit is not really a very desirable total substitute for a private car except in the densest of cities, so I don't think a merely "funding" it would take many private cars out of people homes.

It's because you don't really know public transit. I'd rather take my three hour ride in a train (with free wifi and electricity) than drive for 5 hours on a mind-numbing highway. it cost me less too. I still subsidize cars and highways, don't get me wrong, but the energy efficiency of one of the most inefficient modern electric train is so much better than a car that it cost me less despite a third of my local taxes going into road and parking infrastructure.

> It's because you don't really know public transit.

Come on. I know my living situation and that of others, and there's no conceivable public transit system that would cause me to stop owning a car.

> I'd rather take my three hour ride in a train (with free wifi and electricity) than drive for 5 hours on a mind-numbing highway.

And I might do that too if I had a commute like that, but even in that case I'd still keep a private car for other trips.

Ok, i get that. I'd rather rent or borrow a car when i need one (some weekends, for a road trip...). My point was that city density isn't really needed to go full public transit. I lived 5 years in a city with a density of 304 hab./km2 (twice that in summer), without a car. I used the bus when i did not felt like riding my bike, and the train for large distances. Now i'm in a city with 2.2k hab./km2, and yes, it is easier, but you don't need that much density to go full public transport.

> Also, public transit is not really a very desirable total substitute for a private car except in the densest of cities,

See point about defunding.