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Ask HN: In 15 years, what will a gas station visit look like?

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31–40 of 173 posts

Re: Ask HN: In 15 years, what will a gas station visit look like?

#31
post #4

It is hard to predict a new advancement in EV technology, but if we get to a point where an EV is cheaper than the equivalent ICE and charges faster than you can gas up (so about twice as fast as the fastest EV today), and has a longer range than the equivalent ICE, then people will buy more of them. Then we will start to see more EV chargers than gas stations. Advancements in AI might make it possible to have attend…

Automated payment is already very much the norm. Just put in your credit card before refueling.

Vending machines solved the automated snack sales decades ago, except for the restocking.

Re: Ask HN: In 15 years, what will a gas station visit look like?

#33
post #21

Not sure where you are, but hopefully we try harder to move away from cars in the US and adopt more rail (light, high-speed long distance, etc.) so in that world, they get replaced with housing or literally anything else.

Rail isn't gonna do anything to help suburbs and rural areas. Nor even cities, if they are spread out like LA.

Re: Ask HN: In 15 years, what will a gas station visit look like?

#34
post #21

Not sure where you are, but hopefully we try harder to move away from cars in the US and adopt more rail (light, high-speed long distance, etc.) so in that world, they get replaced with housing or literally anything else.

Gas stations are almost all hazmat sites. The underground tanks leak and years of spills accumulate. They will need to excavate and remediate before housing could be built on the sites.

Re: Ask HN: In 15 years, what will a gas station visit look like?

#38
First I’d answer the question: should there be any gas stations at all? With self driving vehicles you could imagine a future where self driving gas dispensing trucks roam the highways to refill cars as they go.

Or instead of trucks you could imagine that the left lane on highways could be replaced by some kind of train on rails that your car could dock to. In that train you’d have the same crap you have in current gas stations: mostly toilets and food stuff.

Cars docking to stuff is something that really clicks with me, but you could really go one step further away. You could split cars between the part that runs and the part that carries passengers. The part that carries people could be some kind of capsule akin to a boat container that could be loaded onto something else. When on the highway, this cabin could be put on some giant train that would carry hundreds of these capsules and when you need to get off the highway, your capsule would be loaded on some independent single-capsule vehicle, that would drive you where you need to go.

It’s probably all terrible ideas because that would make everything a lot less resilient to problems in terms of operation, but you said sci fi :-)

Oh and yeah 15 years is way too short to see that kind of changes.

Re: Ask HN: In 15 years, what will a gas station visit look like?

#39
post #29

Most countries will have fast chargers with one gas pump for the remaining ICE cars. That’s already happening in Norway, for example. The US? After a decade plus of authoritarian rule and the near outlaw of EVs, we’ll have exactly the same gas stations and cars, all produced right here because the rest of the world doesn’t want them.

Can you explain to me about the near outlaw of EVs?

Re: Ask HN: In 15 years, what will a gas station visit look like?

#40
post #9

2040 feels far too soon for this thought experiment, at least in the U.S. ICEs will remain the primary vehicle for most families until charging networks are built out. 40-50 years is more realistic.

Depends where. EVs are already 23% of light vehicle sales in California. The US won’t transition equally.

And the median car is 13 years old and getting older. If the market share is only 23% today, then in 2040 the fleet will still be overwhelmingly ICE-powered, unless the government starts pulling levers that accelerate the transition, like quadrupling the fuel taxes.
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