On June 11, the BBC reported a story entitled: “Why it’s the end of the road for petrol stations,” by Justin Rowlatt. Having checked this guy out I discovered he is actually an adult and not a GCSE student who had stayed up late the previous night and rushed his homework. Can the BBC actually publish unresearched fiction like this? Well, apparently they can.
The basis of Justin’s argument is that we will all eventually be driving electric cars, and charging those electric cars will not be the problem but rather finding a petrol station to fill our cars will be.Now maybe if he’d bothered to check, Jason would have discovered that we currently have 8,500 forecourts in the UK of which the majority will still be available to the public well beyond 2040. Why, he may ask? Well, if the same reporter had contacted the PRA they would have told him that the forecourt operators wash the nation’s 31 million cars, provide top-up shopping for their local communities, serve a serious amount of coffee and feed lots of hungry motorists etc.Then the guy picks out Erik Fairbairn of Pod Point for notoriety... who I hear you ask? I have no idea but maybe Justin is a shareholder in Pod Point? This dude is just one of the many guys promising to be the answer to all future EV charging needs. With much of the future still unclear I’m not convinced this guy will be the Messiah!
Lastly the journalist asks why anybody in their right mind would build a petrol station in a community and trust their customers to fill their hot cars with flammable liquids. Well Justin, if you’d checked you’d see that we are still building forecourts. Have you missed a hundred years in the evolution of safety in mechanical engineering? Suggesting the sector’s operation is dangerous and 31 million motorists are conducting dangerous activities is an absolute disgrace.
Now I may be from Ireland but I still grew up trusting theBBC to produce real and factual journalism and not this absolute attack on a sector that has served the UK motorist safely for over a century. Moving forward, for factual and objective information, I’ll start referring to TheSun!
