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Electric cars?

Would you buy an electric car?

  • Already own one

    Votes: 10 5.1%

  • Yes - would definitely buy

    Votes: 43 21.7%

  • Yes - preferred over petrol car if price/power/convenience similar

    Votes: 78 39.4%

  • Maybe - preference for neither, only concerned with costs etc

    Votes: 38 19.2%

  • No - prefer petrol car even if electric car has same price, power and convenience

    Votes: 25 12.6%

  • No - would never buy one

    Votes: 14 7.1%
  • Total voters
    198
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Yeah, I reckon the fuel companies are way ahead of us here.

I suspect they're having quite a few quiet conversations with charging companies like BLNK etc behind the scenes. Removing the underground fuel tanks would create a fantastic space to fill with a massive battery pack that could fast-charge cars and then charge 24/7 (so to speak) off the normal grid and thus avoid upgrading the grid itself.

But again, how many people are going to use them? I suspect it's going to be a tiny fraction of people and that's only going to decrease as battery tech gets better.

I.e the more juice batteries can charge, the less necessary charging stations are going to be. Even looking at the small number of servo's that are going to be converted, demand is only going to DECREASE for them as battery tech gets better.

So my suspicion is that the first maybe 10% (or whatever) of servo's will get converted, but after that, battery tech itself will make even those virtually obsolete.
 
I don't have any figures but I walk past the nearest servo pretty often and of an evening especially, I'd say that less than 50% of customers actually buy fuel. They're there to buy bread, milk, junk food or whatever from the shop not to fill their car with fuel.

Unfortunately I didn't have a phone with me otherwise I'd have taken a photo but yes I've seen an EV pulled up beside a petrol pump. Driver was buying something from the shop.

That would be very location specific obviously. Around here the servo is simply the nearest shop of any kind and the only retail outlet of any sort that's open 24 hours. All up, they seem to sell rather a lot of pies, donuts and so on and I suspect that's where the real profit is in it all.

Beyond that, at the global level at least Shell does have a presence overseas selling hydrogen and BP does have BP branded EV chargers. They exist and they look exactly like what you'd expect them to look like - same familiar logo and corporate colours etc.

One thing there's a general cautiousness about in the power industry, and this comes from the technical people by the way, is that technical people are very good at coming up with technical things but not generally much good at marketing and when it comes to the general public it's marketing which sells products not technical brilliance.

With that in mind the most obvious approach, from a technical perspective, is that EV owners will come home, plug their car in and leave it plugged in until next time they go somewhere. The car will basically always be in use as a car, parked at a destination, or sitting at home with the plug in. From a technical perspective that makes absolute sense.

There's a definite thought though that in practice that might be completely wrong in terms of what consumers actually do, at least unless someone persuades them to do it. Hence there's quite a bit of "yep that makes sense but let's see what happens in practice" sort of thinking. Nobody's totally convinced as to how it'll actually play out.

A point that often comes up is to then point out that there's a pretty long list of obsolete ideas and technologies which are still commonplace in practice meanwhile other far more recent ideas have been embraced by consumers to the point that their relatively recent predecessors are now completely dead.

In 2021 you can still buy a newspaper, you can still withdraw cash over the counter at a bank and Australia Post still delivers letters but you can't rent a DVD. That's despite DVD's being the last of those to theoretically become obsolete - over the counter banking was old hat 35 years ago after all.

Even more odd, cassette tapes seem to be making a comeback.

Consumers in practice do a lot of things that anyone looking at it from a purely technical perspective would never have expected.

That broad observation is leading to some "keep a close watch on it to see what happens" sort of thinking when it comes to EV charging. Everyone understands what logically will occur, but there's a definite thought that there's a risk that in practice consumers don't actually do what everyone assumes they'll do and that in practice they might, for example, all decide to plug the car in on Tuesday night or something like that.
 
Oh yes a mate of mine worked in a servo back when we were in school. They make just a few cents off the fuel - the overwhelming majority of the profit comes from selling the snacks, drinks etc. The fuel is just to get you in the door. Sometimes they even run it as a loss-leader.
 
Yep, think about the petrol stations you currently use the most and how regularly you visit them, most likely you only visit them 1 a week of so, and that normally first thing on your way out or last thing on your way home.

Now think about how often you would actually visit them if you had your own fuel pump in you garage that cost 25cents per litre, leaving home every morning with a full tank and knowing you can refill once you get home, you aren't going to be using any of those local fuel stations you do now.

You, will only be using a fuel station on longer road trips where you burn a full tank or more in a day, and thats not going to be the little local fuel stations in town you use for your daily drives, it will be the larger road houses out on the freeway, that have a McDonalds or a subway.

The suburbs that currently support multiple local service stations will be disappearing, unless they are super convenient for one reason or another.
 
True, I drove my Tesla to my nearest 7/11 petrol station today to put air in the tyres and get a veggie pasti and a Mountain Dew, but I used to do that every week in the old commodore, now its maybe once a month.

In my town we have 9 petrol stations a few are with 100m of each other, 2 actually right next to each other, it's hard to imagine them all surviving without the traffic brought by petrol sales, as I said a couple in each suburb might survive based on charging and the convenience store sales, but the ones that aren't well located will struggle and probably close.

Even the 24/7 availability of pies doesn't guarantee anything when you have McDonalds etc becoming 24/7 also these days in most areas, sure people will still want to buy cigarettes etc, but do we need 9 24/7 cigarette shops in my town? probably not.
 
Thinking about a previous fuel situation, kerosene.

Back when I was a kid, every servo sold kerosene either from a pump or from a drum.

I'm not aware of any servo that still sells kerosene today.

One by one they all got rid of it. Want kero and this servo no longer sells it? Go to another one then. Slowly but surely though the numbers dwindled to the point that it's now gone. If you want kerosene now, you'll need to buy it in bottles from a hardware store etc.

Two stroke the same. BP used to have it on the pump, the old Zoom 25 as it was called, but haven't seen that for a very long time now. If you want two stroke then you'll need to mix it yourself.

Same with other industries too. Eg video rental shops didn't all close overnight, they just closed one by one and there's few if any still trading today, the entire concept's simply no longer relevant.

Servos selling petrol I expect to be the same. Those with the worst locations and smallest volume will be the first to go and slowly but surely it'll decline. In due course a time will come when owning a petrol car is problematic due to fuel availability - not for many years but eventually it'll happen.

What will become a problem in the fairly near future is LPG. As such it's still a product with major use but for running cars it's well and truly in major decline and already servos are routinely taking out the LPG tank and pumps.

LPG sales for automotive use in 2019-20 were down 74% from the 2010-11 volume. At that rate it'll be gone altogether later this decade in terms of a fuel used by cars.

LPG use for other purposes doesn't have that same decline but that's not really much help. Knowing that a factory's running forklifts with it or that someone's cooking with it at home doesn't fill your car. Even though it exists as such, as a motorist it's going to become a major difficulty to obtain in the not too distant future.

LPG sales for automotive use in megalitres:

2013-14 = 1823.3
2014-15 = 1469.4
2015-16 = 1329.4
2016-17 = 1006.3
2017-18 = 779.3
2018-19 = 608.2
2019-20 = 520.7

So it's on a path to oblivion pretty quickly.
 
And in the 2000, lpg was all the rage, a bit like EV now, early adapters the taxi industry, scare of fire, green kudos, claims of big savings, gov incentives then quickly withdrawn
maybe an image of what will happen with EV.have a thought
 
Yes @qldfrog, the Caltex down the road from my place has just had its LPG bulk storage tank removed.
The demise of the petrol stations has already started in W.A, with the advent of more efficient ICE engines a lot of the servos in country towns and on long routes eg Perth to Kal have closed, this is because most cars only need a maximum of one top up on the way.
When I was a young bloke, Kal to Perth was at least two tanks, HQ V8's weren't that fuel efficient. ?
My guess is there will only be enough business for one charging station, in most W.A country towns, the combination of home charging and cost of infrastructure to make the servo financially viable, will lead to consolidation.
 
Yes Frog, LPG is on its way out, it is the electric hybrid that has killed it, the Taxi industry switched to hybrids instead of LPG, They didn't switch back to pure petrol.

I myself owned an LPG car from 2003 till 2019 when I got the Tesla, it was fantastic having the LPG car all those years, I had massive savings in fuel costs, especially because over that time there was a number a fuel shocks when petrol went through the roof.

LPG disappearing isn't a vote for petrol, its a vote for EV's because as I said its the Hybrids that are killing LPG demand, and its the Pure Electrics that will kill petrol demand, and Petrol pumps will eventually begin a decade long decline just like Smurf explained LPG is facing.

I remember back when I first filled my LPG tank, LPG was $0.295 cents, today the Tesla is cheaper than that.
 
I wonder also if we will have big generator next:
It is one thing to carry a trucload of fuel into the outback from time to time and refill the remote servos in the roadhouses, another to bring reliable major power to these.
As long as those woke media and political leaders keep listening to european or asian schemes, we will be screwed.
 
My guess is in some instances H2 will reign supreme.
 
qldfrog said:
so delivery of H2 by truck to feed a generator and load the city slickers ;\'Tesla utes at the roadhouse?
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Not really, I have always lived and worked in the outback, I was a project supervisor for regional and remote power stations, lived in Dampier before there was a Karratha or a Wickham, crossed the Nullabor before it was sealed, have done the Canning stock route and the Simpson desert, crossed the great central road numerous times. So I'm just try to think what is logical, logistically and practically.

My guess is that there will be solar/H2 mix, solar to charge BEV's because in reality not many drive anymore, it costs $450 to fly Perth/Sydney to drive costs about $2,000 depending on vehicle how many people and accomodation/ food preferences.
So the only major fuel concern is for freight truck fueling, I think H2 is probably the logical fuel, however battery may by viable, so ATM it is up in the air.
So the road houses will have large solar arrays charging BEV's and making H2, the benefit with H2 it can be trucked in if local production fails. Time will tell.
 
There's also the reality that a 1MW diesel generator fits in a 20' shipping container and if all else fails then it's not actually a problem if the less than 1% of vehicle charging that's done in the middle of nowhere is powered from diesel. It still gets the other >99% off liquid fuels.
 
Absolutely, Cummings make a beautiful 1MW acoustically covered skid mount, i have commissioned many.
 
sptrawler said:
it costs $450 to fly Perth/Sydney to drive costs about $2,000 depending on vehicle how many people and accomodation/ food preferences.
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Costs quite a lot when there's 4 people and you make the trip with two cars and a motorbike.

Our accommodation was pretty cheap though.
 
Smurf1976 said:
Costs quite a lot when there's 4 people and you make the trip with two cars and a motorbike.

Our accommodation was pretty cheap though.
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That's true when the 4 kids were young, we drove over East in a bitsashiti L300 1600cc, towing a campa van, top speed 80kl/hr.
Was booked going through a two horse town, in the middle of nowhere, at 2am on thur morning, doing 80kl/hr.lol
I said to the cop, mate you need a life. ?
But to put it in context, when a good mate got married in Adelaide in the mid 1980's and wanted me as best man, it cost me $950 return from Perth, I couldn't afford to pay for the wife to go.
 
Especially if that diesel genny is just there to back up a solar and battery system.
 
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