Future of the gas station is mobile
Tank-equipped truck delivers fuel to customers who place orders via text message
For Vancouver drivers wondering how they are going to fill the gas tanks of their cars as service stations disappear around them, there’s now at least one mobile option.
Think of it as a delivery service similar to Skip the Dishes or Amazon, but for gasoline. Consumers order a tankful of fuel delivered to their location by a tank-equipped pickup truck from a company called Filld.
Fuelling a car is “increasingly becoming more of a pain point for consumers,” Filld CEO Michael Buhr said. “(Vancouver) is a classic example of this. There is one gas station left in downtown Vancouver and that’s not the way it was 10 years ago or 20 years ago.”
“And that’s not a unique thing. There are a number of cities across the U.S. that have (gas stations close) as well,” which is partly where Filld has seen the opportunity to step in, Buhr said.
The company refers to itself as a “last mile mobile fuelling company,” and Buhr said their intent is to build a new fuelling infrastructure that is adaptable to changing needs of car drivers.
In the U.S., it operates along with competitors such as Booster Fuel, Yoshi and Purple.
Filld landed in Vancouver a little more than a year ago to service Car2Go’s 1,100-vehicle fleet and learn the market. It launched generally to consumers in the past two weeks.
The company started in 2015 in the San Francisco Bay area, and operates in Portland, Seattle and Washington, D.C. In Portland and Seattle, however, they still only fuel fleet vehicles.
“(Our) vision is you should be able to fill a car with gas no matter where it is, what time it is — to really make it far more convenient than going to a gas station,” Buhr said.
Potential customers register with Filld online and can place orders via text message, Buhr said. The company charges drivers a price that is the average of nearby gas stations plus a $5 delivery fee.
Filld uses data-driven mapping to direct its drivers (it has 10 tank-equipped pickup trucks on the road in Vancouver, Burnaby and West Vancouver) on optimal routes to make deliveries, Buhr said, and will stop by customers’ homes overnight or while they are at work during the day.
Feedback has been positive so far, Buhr said “Some (customers) say it’s like the gas fairy has come overnight.”
It is no surprise to demographer and urban-development expert Andy Yan that a service like Filld would come along, considering that Vancouver has lost 35 per cent of its gas stations in the past the last 20 years, to 68 this year from 105 in 1998.
“This is an era of technological disruption,” said Yan, director of the City Program at Simon Fraser University. “Whether it’s ride hailing or Airbnb and food delivery, one can assume gas delivery would be inevitable.”
All Filld’s trucks, which can carry up to 1,500 litres of gasoline each, are Transport Canada certified and equipped with spill kits and fire extinguishers. Buhr said the company hasn’t had any serious accidents or spill incidents in over 250,000 fill-ups since its inception.
“If I have a safety issue, I don’t have a business anymore,” Buhr said.