Recently I read an article in the Economist which discussed the differences between how car service stations were considered in America and Europe. According to the article, Americans tend to have a positive attitude towards them, choosing to locate them in prime central urban areas. In contrast, Europeans have a more negative opinion of service stations relegating them to out of town areas such as ring roads and shopping centres. This observation has been backed up by the downward trend in service station numbers in Europe with tens of thousands going out of business in the last decade. Supermarkets have taken up the slack to a certain degree and the combination of doing your shopping and filling up your car seems popular. It isn’t too much of a leap to envisage that Europeans would tend to value the ability to avoid service stations in the future altogether by purchasing a Plug-in vehicle more so than Americans as a result of this embedded attitude.
