8 Comments

I've thought about this a lot, and we have seen this before. One hundred years ago we transitioned to the ICE at the expense of our old friend, the horse, along with the millions of very specialized jobs and the enormous body of knowledge that accompanied the care and maintenance of the half-ton beasts. I grew up with horses and I will cheerfully admit that I don't know 1/100th of what my grandpa knew about them. Now, I will say that I regret the loss of our ancient heritage, our symbiotic relationship with the horse, in a way that I'll never miss knowing how to re-ring and service an ICE engine.

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and as someone who works in a regulatory agency that has had to deal with the consequences of the crappy maintenance of some of these sites underground storage tanks I can only say thank F it can't happen soon enough.

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Mechanics too. There's a lot fewer moving parts in an EV. Perhaps reduced to changing a few tyres. Not as dire as a servo though.

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Most local servos are more corner-store than petrol specialist. Some are a chain of fancy, David-Jones branded take-away food shops now, aren't they?

I've never been able to figure out why we even still have petrol stations with all the trimmings. Most of Europe has replaced them with small, unmanned versions. Bowsers with their own credit card machine. (Three out of four of which will be sitting there with a charge rung up, waiting to be paid...)

What's going to be really interesting is the question of how much bother it will be to find some petrol, at any price, for the cars that are still on the road by then. The working life of a car is not short.

Per newsagents, post offices are in much the same situation. No-one does letters much any more. Parcels have slightly different dynamics, and they're really the only thing that needs delivering. So Post offices still in business trade on newsagent-style knick-knacks and banking services. With the latter gradually completing the move to on-line that'll be another business model go fluie. Some parts of Europe have a little "post-office" corner franchise in general stores...

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They should have a chat with newsagents...

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