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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

While I agree with the author that electric vehicles will in not long time dominate the car market, I strongly disagree with point #3:

> Gas stations will start to go out of business as many more electric cars are sold, making gasoline powered vehicles even more inconvenient.

Gas stations even today don't make money with gas, it's next to a loss leader to get customers into the store and spend money on snacks and car parts that won't go away with e-cars (windshield wipers, wiper fluid) - and in many regions gas stations are exempt from normal store opening hours and serve as 24h-supermarket. The convenience of a readily available store, even with a hefty markup, simply is too good to avoid it.

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But once it's no longer an effective loss leader, they might just stop selling gas, which has the same effect.

You can see from land use patterns (at least in the West Coast North American cities I'm familiar with) that at a certain land value the retail gasoline business no longer pencils out, or at a minimum it becomes more of a natural monopoly. Intersections in gentrifying neighborhoods that used to have two or three gas stations increasingly have one or none.

Like drive-thru restaurants and banks, they're pretty effective at sabotaging walkability, so I wouldn't be too sad to see them go (or transition into just convenience stores).

Aren't they convenient because they're only a few yards from your car? If you no longer need to drive to the gas station to get fuel, it's a lot less convenient, isn't it?

They're convenient because they're right off the freeway. The gas pumps will disappear and be replaced with superchargers.

The author completely blundered with that claim. Cars on the road have become more than 10% more efficient over the past few decades, but gas stations didn't go out of business en masse like he prophesies a 10% electric fleet will cause. As everybody else already pointed out, self-driving cars will change everything, not the few years in which the personal vehicle market becomes a little more electric.

>Gas stations even today don't make money with gas

I've heard this a lot, but is this really true? Gas is highly regulated in the U.S. and supposedly a Mom & Pop gas station's gas is just as good as Shell or Chevron..(because they are inspected yearly by the local county's Weights and Measurements department) But the price difference can be quite large, e.g., 15%+ higher sometimes. Also I'm curious how Costco gas is so cheap? Anyway so who is eating up this difference in price? Shell is making quite a bit off gas then? or is the owner of that particular gas station taking the profit?

For Costco, gas is a loss leader for custom loyalty. People go crazy for saving $4 dollars for gas, even if it means waiting 15min in line.

In most areas all the gas comes from the same distribution terminal. Some companies have some proprietary additive blends but in general it really makes very little difference where you buy it (assuming the retailer doesn't have a problem like groundwater getting into the storage tanks, etc).

exactly, so who is making the extra 10% profit? or it's nonsense that owning a gas station is a low margin business?

I live in SF. Within 2 blocks of me 3 gas stations have shut down over the past few years, to be replaced with apartments/condos. Probably it's not related to electric cars per se; but it is probably related to the decline in personal driving.

It's probably related to sitting on $2 million of land.

...or the supply limitations on SF's local real estate space

surely they will just change the name of them then to shops :) or stores as you call the over there. over here we have petrol stations and other places called 'services' which basically serve the function you are on about. so i guess we will just rename the petrol stations to services, the ones that survive that is. this cant come quick enough for me!

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