Mobile service topping up growing gap in stations
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 (seen gas stations closed) 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 the 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, it still fuels only 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 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.”
Yan said the decline in servicestation numbers has been driven both by technology — cars are more fuel-efficient and need less gas — and the high price of land that makes residential development a more lucrative proposition for owners.
“That’s kind of pushed the gas pedal on development of these sites,” Yan said.
However, Yan said gasoline delivery has safety and environmental implications “you don’t get with driving around someone’s burrito,” which must spur regulatory requirements.
Buhr said the company does take safety seriously with measures that include employing commercially licensed drivers who are trained above required standards in hazardous-materials handling, spill procedures and firefighting.
In the City of Vancouver, Filld was required to provide the list of items it carries for spill cleanup and copies of its spill-management and safety plans before getting its business licence, said Kathryn Holm, the city ’s director of licensing and community standards.
Capt. Jonathan Gormick of Vancouver Fire and Rescue said in an email that the department doesn’t have specific concerns about the service, as long as its vehicles meet Transport Canada regulations.
“There are already light-duty vehicles that transport large quantities of fuel for farm and construction equipment,” Gormick said, “So this isn’t anything new in terms of transporting flammable products.”
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 more than 250,000 fill-ups since its inception.
“If I have a safety issue, I don’t have a business anymore,” Buhr said.
One of B.C.’s biggest service-station operators is confident enough in Filld’s vision for the mobile future for gas stations to buy into the concept. Parkland Fuel Corp., which operates Chevron-branded service stations in B.C., announced on Nov. 15 that it had co-led a $15-million financing of Filld’s expansion, just as the company was ready to launch in Vancouver.
The idea is to make sure drivers have access to fuel “no matter where they are in Vancouver,” Parkland vice-president Ian White said in a news release.
No one from the company was available for a followup interview, but in the news release White said Parkland and Filld plan to bring the service to major markets across Canada.