In theory gas pumping is a dangerous thing that should be left to professionals. If you pump your own gas, do you ever read the long list of safety requirements posted on the pumps? They say all number of things including: You must be electrically grounded. You must watch the pump at all times. You must not open car doors while pumping. You must not spill gas onto the ground. You must not leave the pump attached when you drive away. And so on for lists of hundreds of safety requirements, all of which are based on real (explosive) problems.
There are so many failure cases, and most people that regularly pump their own gas are naive/blase about them. (Watching people at gas stations fill gas tanks while understanding that massive list of safety requirements, being very aware that all mistakes involve an explosive substance, and counting all the violations you can spot is one "fun" way to lose a lot of faith in humanity.)
Thankfully, there's a lot of regularly inspected safety equipment compensating for how blase so many people are. Modern pumps have all sorts of auto-shut-off sensors and require all sorts of (literal) firewalls and conscious designs. These have mostly eliminated a lot of the errors from being fatal in practice, allowing so many of naive and/or blase to live another day.
In practice in places like Oregon (and Japan) this was a jobs protection thing. It saved some low wage jobs from companies that had every incentive to eliminate those jobs to scrimp and save money. It was more useful to Oregon to keep those jobs than to let them disappear.
(Arguably Oregon is allowing them to disappear only just a few years in advance of them disappearing naturally because gas pumps are likely to start disappearing altogether as EVs become more prominent. They can't protect those jobs in the EV present.)
WorldMaker|2 years ago
There are so many failure cases, and most people that regularly pump their own gas are naive/blase about them. (Watching people at gas stations fill gas tanks while understanding that massive list of safety requirements, being very aware that all mistakes involve an explosive substance, and counting all the violations you can spot is one "fun" way to lose a lot of faith in humanity.)
Thankfully, there's a lot of regularly inspected safety equipment compensating for how blase so many people are. Modern pumps have all sorts of auto-shut-off sensors and require all sorts of (literal) firewalls and conscious designs. These have mostly eliminated a lot of the errors from being fatal in practice, allowing so many of naive and/or blase to live another day.
In practice in places like Oregon (and Japan) this was a jobs protection thing. It saved some low wage jobs from companies that had every incentive to eliminate those jobs to scrimp and save money. It was more useful to Oregon to keep those jobs than to let them disappear.
(Arguably Oregon is allowing them to disappear only just a few years in advance of them disappearing naturally because gas pumps are likely to start disappearing altogether as EVs become more prominent. They can't protect those jobs in the EV present.)
lesuorac|2 years ago
EVs were originally a "Woman's Car" because a petrol car would get the operator quite dirty while an EV wouldn't stain a dress.
blahyawnblah|2 years ago
You can pump your own diesel, or your own gas for a motorcycle. But it was for Class 1 (I forget number) flammable liquids