[phil21]

> Pulling into the station, waiting in line, hitting the rest room and paying the bill need to be included too to get a relative penalty.

This is not the average experience for a US driver. Very few gas stations ever have all their pumps utilized, even during rush hour. I haven't gone into a gas station in years, or waited on paying the bill - everything is automated at the pump.

I would put the "convenience store" aspects at par - you either want some snacks or need to use to rest room or do not - the fuel type doesn't change that.

Payment again I'd put at par - swipe a credit card at the "pump".

Maybe add a minute for "average wait for a free pump" to the gas station model, but I'd argue that problem would be even worse (or at least par) with electric charging.

The only real win I can see is that you could do other things away from the vehicle while it charges (attended vs. unattended fueling) which lets you parallelize some activities above. But that only becomes useful once the refueling times become within the average potty/snack break at a gas station - and we're no where near there yet.

[theandrewbailey]

> Very few gas stations ever have all their pumps utilized, even during rush hour.

The ones operated by grocery stores (giving gas discounts on $X of groceries bought) are always full during rush hour.

[ajross]

You're overcomplicating. Take a stopwatch. Start it at the point where you exit your normal driving routine to "get gas". Stop it when you resume. Take that time, subtract the time spent actually pumping fuel (which even in your convenient utopia is still going to be less than 1/3 of the total), and add the time spent to equivalently charge the vehicle.

Then divide the two totals to get a relative penalty to an electric car. If you're doing the analysis any other way, you're almost certainly doing it wrong.

[saurik]

Yes, on average this would slightly affect the result, but I'd be shocked if a non-negligible number of trips to the gas station for most car drivers involved entering the convenience store, particularly to "hit the restroom". Most people spend their lives driving back and forth between two places that have clean and (certainly relatively to a gas station) pleasant restrooms: the only people stopping at a gas station are on long road trips; and while I do a ton of these, I'm still usually not doing it a gas station: most people are probably stopping at whatever their favorite fast food restaurant is and going to the bathroom there, which satisfies their food craving at better cost efficiency than the overpriced even lower quality junk at the gas station and, at least today, doesn't parallelize that well with either filling their gas tank or charging their battery. (And except during small windows of time when only desperate people are getting gas, there generally are not lines at gas stations.)

[ajross]

> I'd be shocked if a non-negligible number of trips to the gas station for most car drivers involved entering the convenience store, particularly to "hit the restroom".

I'm going to contend you're exactly wrong, actually -- literally backwards.

For an electric car, routine fillups don't actually exist. You charge it at home and it's always "full" for commute trips.

Electric service station visits happen on long trips. Notably, so do bladder full exceptions and blood sugar shortfalls.