Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "Will electric cars kill gas stations?" video.

  1. Question though: what's the difference between a gas station with a pub, and a pub with chargers for customer use in the parking lot? I mean, you've got a point, obviously, but with the change in infrastructure, the difference becomes a bit arbratrary. Also, how is one defining a Pub? Because in some times and places it's meant a full inn, or small hotel, that is licensed to sell alcohol. And/or a restaurant (which, depending on the neighborhood and thus clientele, it's perfectly reasonable to take your kids to, at least once they're old enough that one can reasonabley expect them to behave well enough not to bother the other patrons). Not necessarily something you want at a highway rest stop (unless it has much stricter licensing terms regarding who gets served how much under what circumstances, at least), but other wise quite reasonable.
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  2. Even taking transmission loss into account, you're still making gains on miles-to-polution-generated by switching to electric, even using Coal plants, which are pretty awful, due to scaling factors in the generation process. Heck, if I understand correctly, just dumping the fuel that would have gone into car engines into a properly designed power plant instead of an individual engine per vehicle would make a huge difference. (Bad as it is, it's better than coal!) Microgeneration actually loses some of those benefits again. Photovoltaic cells have the same disposal issue as batteries (well, different chemicals, same problem though). Wind is not particularly reliable in most places. Nuclear has a Lot of issues surrounding the existence of nuclear weapons to deal with (both the desire for the military to have materials for nuclear weapons, and the desire to then Not let anyone Else have said materials, for obvious reasons), and has the issue that, if an accident Does occur, about the only thing worse, depending how you measure it, is being directly down stream from a hydro electric dam that has just suffered a catastrophic failure. Now, obviously, this is vanishingly unlikely with a properly designed, built, maintained, and protected power plant... But really, the USA can't even maintain its highways, bridges, and storm drains reliably. It's far from unheard of to be able to get into the secure parts of nuclear missile silos by pretending to be a pizza delivery guy. For most people, that sort of thing seems like a bad gamble the odds of failure are low, but not zero, and the consequences extreme. Mind you, if anyone ever cracks a practical Fusion generator (rather than fission), it's my understanding that most of the catastrophic failure states become much less... Catastrophic... For the surrounding... Er... Everything. (On an interesting side note, on a day to day basis, Coal plants irradiate their surroundings more than nuclear plants do, as they have little or nothing in the way of measures to actually prevent this.) Improvements are, obviously, always desirable, of course.
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  3. An entertaining counter point to that claim (and others like it) is to list off all the industries created or revived by millennials. The modern board game industry, for example. I remember something about there actually being a market for what amounts to cobblers again (in the USA, I believe it was) as people ran the numbers and realized they're better off shelling out for the expensive, custom or semi-custom made (better fit and style), higher quality, often locally made, shoes that can take more abuse and last a lot longer before they need replacing, rather than buying mass produced garbage that needs replacing 5 times as often or more, is routinely overpriced, and is made in a different country entirely.
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  4. Hydrogen in most cases is just a fuel cell that powers an electrical system anyway. Better all 'round to just skip the middleman. Also, the production, transportation, and storage of hydrogen is a pain, and uses a fair bit of energy, so even if you Do get hydrogen fueled internal combustion going, straight up electric is Still better for most personal vehicle use cases. You know, at a strictly technological level. There's plenty of room for the businesses involved to screw it all up, of course.
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  5. That would be Entirely relevant... If the subject of the video was any of those jobs, or Indian people in general, rather than, you know, Explicitly About Gas Stations!
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  6. Indeed. Though, it's going yo be a while longer before most trucks go electric, so those ones might actually keep selling gasoline, at least for a while.
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  7. Currently, in New Zealand, deseil vehicle (mostly not cars) owners are charged a road usage tax based on a meter on the vehicle, and its weight class. I believe electric vehicles are the same. Vehicles with Petrol engines, on the other hand, are taxed based of fuel usage. There's literally a levy on the petrol at the pump. Thing is, you're charged GST (sales tax, essentially) on the actual sale price of the goods in question, so your tax gets taxed! (The same thing happens with tobacco, actually). The others pay their road usage tax as, you know, a tax. No GST on that. Also, NZ petrol prices are just high to start with, partially due to shipping costs. Mind you, Something about how the taxes work mean that, with the already high petrol prices, when oil prices spike... Something in the system absorbs most of the spike so fuel costs to the consumer don't bounce up and down anything like as much as they do elsewhere. Anyway, the point is that there's a Lot of money to be saved on fuel by switching to electricity, which may or may not leave room for spending more at the associated businesses on a regular basis, but certainly reduces strain on the budget if you live somewhere that cars are more necessity than luxury.
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  8. Less annoying if the charger is located somewhere you'd want to be anyway, of course. The supermarket, that restaurant that serves particularly good breakfasts st a decent price, the games/comic shop you and your buddies hang out at for several hours a couple of times a week anyway, the movie theater*, and so on. This could potentially have the bonus advantage of breaking up rush hour a bit, ad people take different routes to different places to stop different lengths of time (minimum of however long a charge cycle is) on their way to or from work. Obviously, there's a lot of vague hand waving to be found in those thoughts, but it's worth looking into! *Actually, given that these are slowly starting to die out, there might arguably be a market to bring back the drive-in movie theater... That is also a charging station. Arguably you'd want to show shorter movies... Though if people are stopping in every day on their way to or from work anyway there's room for showing what amount to tv shows! Still, yu couldn't just show the same movie at the same time every day, or on the sane day if the week several weeks in a row, if you're expecting people to stop in regularly as part of their commute...
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