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Comment by rebolek | Hacker News Reader

Death spiral to gas stations? why? EV cars need to charge somewhere (and on long trip it can’t be at home) and people need to take a break and grab a coffee sometime too. They will change, sure, but certainly not die. Refineries will be fewer but we do need another products from them also.

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Presumably a lot of people will charge at home which significantly cuts down the number of stations needed or the traffic to those stations.

For example, I have 2 gas stations within a mile of my home. They stay pretty busy because people around me constantly need to fill up. I, on the other hand, basically never visit either of those stations since I switched to an EV. I charge at home.

If everyone around me switched to EVs, those stations could not stay in business. There's a grocery store in the same area which makes anything those stations offer obsolete.

Those are the majority of gas stations that die with a mass switch over to EVs. There's a gas station for my hometown without an attached convenience store with 300 people there. There's no way that station stays in service if a significant portion of the community switches to EVs. It already struggles to be profitable as is (I know the owner).

That might be the case in places where most people live in single-family homes with dedicated garage.

Where I live (Spain) that's not the case at all - our towns are very dense. People in big cities tend to live mostly in flats (Europe's highest elevators-per-capita). Even people in the countryside, where it's more common to have a 1-family homes, often don't have a dedicated garage.

Chargers can be anywhere. They are at grocery stores, parking lots, restaurants, I can see the need for a dedicated re fuel station to disappear when charging is ubiquitous.

This is what people don’t get. Charging just means parking. The idea of dedicated charging stations where you stand around doing nothing, maybe buying a candy bar, really only make sense in the context of a fuel which is not literally already everywhere.

I've seen this on the Autobahns: what were just parking spots with unattended bathrooms are becoming little charging stations. Since I don't have an EV yet, I've not stopped at one to see how high-speed the chargers are, but at the very least, I assume that 10-15 minutes would be enough to get you somewhere more efficient/pleasant to wait for a full charge.

Charging stations will only need to be on highways if cities are sensible and build slow charging infrastructure (aka normal wall sockets) in parking spaces. Urban gas stations will be a thing of the past.

A place where you can take a break and grab a coffee is called a cafe, not a gas station.

Also, with Chinese manufacturers increasingly pushing out batteries capable of 1000+ km, you'll be able to charge fully at home for increasingly long road trips.

I'm using the definitions:

- Gas Station = retail outlet that sells and dispenses gasoline and other petroleum-based fuel products

- Charging station = place to charge your EV

Could be an interesting long bet. Will the number of retail locations selling gasoline in the UK in the year 2045 be higher or lower than in 2026?

In 2045 petrol stations will be well on the way the being about as rare as places selling paraffin or special racing car fuel today.

I don't see how this is an interesting bet. No new petrol car will have been sold for 10 years. Places selling fuel for large lorries etc will last a bit longer, but these are already a fraction of the total.

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