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Comment by YChacker100 | Hacker News Reader

Why was this illegal previously?

In theory gas pumping is a dangerous thing that should be left to professionals. If you pump your own gas, do you ever read the long list of safety requirements posted on the pumps? They say all number of things including: You must be electrically grounded. You must watch the pump at all times. You must not open car doors while pumping. You must not spill gas onto the ground. You must not leave the pump attached when you drive away. And so on for lists of hundreds of safety requirements, all of which are based on real (explosive) problems.

There are so many failure cases, and most people that regularly pump their own gas are naive/blase about them. (Watching people at gas stations fill gas tanks while understanding that massive list of safety requirements, being very aware that all mistakes involve an explosive substance, and counting all the violations you can spot is one "fun" way to lose a lot of faith in humanity.)

Thankfully, there's a lot of regularly inspected safety equipment compensating for how blase so many people are. Modern pumps have all sorts of auto-shut-off sensors and require all sorts of (literal) firewalls and conscious designs. These have mostly eliminated a lot of the errors from being fatal in practice, allowing so many of naive and/or blase to live another day.

In practice in places like Oregon (and Japan) this was a jobs protection thing. It saved some low wage jobs from companies that had every incentive to eliminate those jobs to scrimp and save money. It was more useful to Oregon to keep those jobs than to let them disappear.

(Arguably Oregon is allowing them to disappear only just a few years in advance of them disappearing naturally because gas pumps are likely to start disappearing altogether as EVs become more prominent. They can't protect those jobs in the EV present.)

I mean cars used to be terribly dangerous (and dirty).

EVs were originally a "Woman's Car" because a petrol car would get the operator quite dirty while an EV wouldn't stain a dress.

Relatedly and further off-topic, I still love how the now often thrown around term "range anxiety" shows up in early literature too but it was originally reversed to how people brandish it about today: early EVs had a reliable range that you knew before you set out and could be charged just about anywhere. Internal combustion was rife with inefficiencies (fuel lossage among them) and available range wasn't always obvious and early fuel gages weren't always reliable and finding sources of fuel relied on lucking into the right sorts of pharmacists/chemists. One of the original reasons for the founding of the AAA (American Automobile Assocation) was "combatting range anxiety" by getting fuel to cars stopped on the side of a road.

At some point we could return to the original meaning, as gas stations become less profitable and less prevalent. It's far easier to have an EV with no public charging than it is to have a gas vehicle with no public filling stations.

I agree and have gotten into some interesting debates for suggesting that not only do I think it likely, that I think it will probably snowball a lot faster (and wilder) than a lot of people expect. (Gas pumps are already weird margin "loss leaders" for other businesses such as convenience stores or supermarkets. Expecting a closure snowball seems reasonable once demand starts to really shift in favor of EVs.)

I think really just non-urban places will be in trouble.

There is no way gas stations on highways are going to close down in the next decade. But if your highway wasn't popular enough to currently have service stations at their rest areas then I don't have much hope your gas stations outside those areas.

Of course this does mean that you might have to drive ~40mins roundtrip to fillup your gas.

"Safety"

You can pump your own diesel, or your own gas for a motorcycle. But it was for Class 1 (I forget number) flammable liquids

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