No Stupid Questions

In Norway, the same petrol stations are still here, but with charging stations as well. So even if there are new places with solely electric charging next to Ikea or fast food shops, the regular petrol stations run as they always have.

Edit to add that some stations have transitioned to unmanned stations where you stop, tap your card and fill. Forgot that as I don't drive unless I rent a car for special needs.

The gas stations around me are displacing fast food. If you need food for fast & cheap, you go to a gas station. I have a feeling this is intentional, they're trying to secure a new business model for when/if we stop using gasoline.

Selling gas is already not profitable. They typically sell it at slightly above cost. The real money maker is the convenience store attached.

Same thing that happened to horse stables

Around where I live gas stations in the traditional sense are getting rare. Most are just pumps and one or several pay stations. You drive up, scan your card or phone, select the product and the pump number. The pump activates and you can fill up. If you want you can go back to the pay station and ask for a receipt if you'd like.

The few manned pumps that still exist are often something else with a gas station attached. Like a large car wash, sandwich shop or convenience store. Especially the large convenience stores are useful, because it's already a good destination people go to regularly. And one of the few places that have LPG, since those normally are required to be manned. Not that many people still drive LPG, given what a pain in the butt that is, but still.

They won't all close at the same time. They don't operate under the same business conditions.

They operate under very similar business conditions, and any small difference will dictate which one will close first.

Whatever the future of petrol, you gotta consider they sell way more than fuel. They're called convenience stores for a reason, which I semi-jokingly refer to as addiction stations. They can and do sell basically anything they legally can that people are addicted to, beer, cigarettes, soft drinks, energy drinks, candy, hot food, etc..

So, whatever the long term future of petroleum, the stores themselves for the most part aren't going anywhere, they'll keep selling every sort of quick grab fast selling goto items that keep the customers coming back.

Most likely fuel stations will retreat to outside of city borders, and obviously a lot being shut down and even more people being laid off along the way. It'll happen slowly but there'll be three or four local ones suddenly disappearing practically overnight, the last few being the ones clinging on for dear life due to having no better options until the inevitable closure.

Many in Urban areas will be fine for quite some time. Others with more space have already started adding EV charging, and increasing the presence of their convenience operations since EV charging customers will be at the properties a bit longer than normal gas fueling customers.

It's just a pivot on their profit model and focus.

Some can be converted to EV chargers. It’s considered contaminated ground, so the options are limited without expensive remediation. Depending on the economic situation they may just be abandoned.

They won’t all shut down at once. The ICE cars won’t all turn off at once; they’ll fade.

There have always been fuel stations that get shut down and you see them around town already either abandoned, repurposed (often hand car washes) or demolished and built over.

As these gradually shut down in the future, I wonder if some could just go straight to becoming commercial charger stations. Or if anyone can think of a better use for a large outdoor covered parking area + large underground storage tank + small convenience store.

I'm going to assume we are discussing the US and Canada, as these are the most auto-dependent places in the world. I'll also divide my response into ideal and realistic scenarios.

The ideal scenario is not that ICE engines are replaced by EVs, but that ICE engines are replaced by walking, cycling, transit, and electric micromobility. This would require:

1. Pigouvian taxes - taxing the release of carbon into the atmosphere, taxing the registration of vehicles (more), taxing the use of highways (for road use and wear and tear) or the use of highway exit ramps (imposing the externality of your vehicle on the urban environment). These taxes can be imposed initially at a very low cost, and then increased over time to gradually make the social costs imposed by these activities equal to the actual cost that users bear. Note: while the taxes themselves are functionally regressive, these proposals tend to be paired with a citizens dividend to offset the increased cost of goods and services and to ease the transition to less carbon intensive ways of living. The only people who will be negatively impacted would be those who already have excess wealth and use it in especially carbon-intensive ways.
2. Relaxation of zoning and building regulations - aka, let people build things. Peoples need for full sized automobiles is driven largely by the fact that their homes are far from their work which is far from the grocery store which is far from their social spaces. This is not a solution which can be solved with infrastructure, as you geometrically cannot fit all the transportation infrastructure between these places in an efficient manner - you need to put these things closer together so that a person can, say, walk from home to a transit station, transit to work, transit to the grocery store, walk home with their groceries, then walk to their social activity. Part of this is ending single family residential zoning, and instead allowing mixed use in all areas, part is changing building requirements - like parking requirements and overly stringent aesthetic conditions, and part is reforming building codes to be more flexible and understandable (note - not in a slapdash DOGE capacity, but reviewed by multidisciplinary teams of experts, with an eye towards making things understandable enough that a fairly average DIYer could confidently do their own construction within the limits of the building code)
3. Intelligent investments in infrastructure and transit. These should prioritize low cost, quick to implement changes in high impact areas - like replacing parking with bike lanes or closing off streets to cars and instead allowing only pedestrians, cyclists, and transit. The most important changes are to rehabilitate old downtowns which were originally pedestrian-friendly, since this will be the highest impact change. Changes should then radiate outwards from urban cores to facilitate movement around the city. In first-ring suburbs, initial big wins are things like implementing BRT lines with frequent schedules along arterials, protected bike lanes on larger neighborhood streets, public protected bike parking and pleasant pedestrian shelters at transit stops, and raised pedestrian crossings, speed bumps, and other traffic calming measures anywhere where cars are driving too fast. Of course, this should also be paired with a mandate to not accept any more sprawling suburban style development into the city's land portfolio, since these developments are a drain on city resources and would simply need to be rehabilitated later. Also note that these changes to infrastructure and transit do not prioritize things like inter-city high speed rail, since as we have seen with these projects in the past, these rail lines end up underutilized as long as their destinations are not walkable. An inter-city BRT line can achieve 90% of the benefits of high-speed rail using existing busses and some paint on the highway. As a rule, grand, ribbon-cutting-worthy transit projects tend to end up as expensive boondoggles which take decades to complete and which are underutilized. Instead, the vast majority of infrastructure improvements should be driven by walking around in neighborhoods and asking "how can we make this more safe and pleasant for everyone?"

In this case, most gas stations would continue to function more or less as they currently do. Fewer people would make the switch to EVs, and would instead simply drive their cars less as they become less dependent on them. But due to lower demand for gas, some gas stations would slowly become financially non-viable, and would go out of business. This wouldn't mean all of them would go out of business at once - instead it would mean that at an intersection with a gas station at each corner, 3 would go out of business and the best one would remain. In denser urban areas, many would likely divide the parcel they are on and continue functioning as a convenience store, while the pump and parking areas turned into some other, better use. Near highways, the larger truck stop style gas stations would likely remain largely the same.

The more realistic scenario is that EV tech evolves and everyone replaces their ICE cars with EV cars. In this case, gas stations will try to predict how the market will move and will try to pivot in whatever direction they expect it will take.

One anticipated direction is that gas stations will turn into charging stations. Since charging, even in the best case, takes a while, these charging stations will provide a more pleasant customer experience, integrating restaurants, shopping, and entertainment to keep customers busy while their cars charge. You can already see the stations anticipating these trends with the rise of "luxury" gas stations like Buccees, Wawa, and Maverik.

Another direction it could go is that instead of a charging station, EVs will develop swappable batteries. This process might require human attendants, and provide jobs for a number of years until the process could be automated.

But in either case, demand for charging stations would be severly reduced in urban areas, as it will be cheaper and more convenient for people to charge at home and at work for their daily commutes. Again, we would see 3 gas stations at an intersection go under while the 4 takes all the remaining business. But under these conditions, the 3 that go under would likely sit as vacant husks, blighting the urban landscape, rather than being redeveloped into something that actually serves people.

one will close - but everyone will go to the other 3 on the intersection thus saving them for a few years. Then another.... and soon the one across town closing helps those left.

the average car is 12 years old so there is a lot of life left in gas stations even after all new cars are ev. once you have a station a lot of the costs are sunk costs so you won't close just because demand drops a little. Chains will build less as the numbers stop working but they will build in places for a while while closing other locations.

They already don't make money off gas

Their profits are the stuff in the store, the excuse people have for overpaying is that they're already there.

We'll see a lot close, and the ones that remain grow to be basic conscience stores.

They'll still have the gas pumps, because it's expensive to remove them. But new builds will likely just be parking lots instead of pumps.

The old stations would be what people have to rely on.

As such the ones on the outskirts would be the ones that close first.

Last gas stations will be in downtown areas where getting rid of 60 year old pumps wouldn't gain anymore parking than people parking at the pumps.

They'll be closed and turned into bistros like the ones in my city have been. Actually pretty cool to go dine at, and be outside and sheltered, what with the steel canopy where the pumps were..

Same thing that happened to them before - when they were Service Stations.

They will close. If you look at how many gas stations there are you’ll see that they are everywhere. I was driving through Iowa and saw an intersection that had 6 gas stations.

I suppose we could also see in the future more cars that can swap their battery in charging stations.

IMO that's the more long term use of these stations. Instead of buying gas you would swap for new batteries.

Gas stations are often well placed for refuelling so might as well repurpose them to do that but for electric cars.

Electric scooters with swappable batteries work super well in urban areas. I'm convinced once this tech is deployed on most cars it will trivialise long trips in electric cars.

This and electrified highways would be amazing.