I’ve always loved driving. Not just as a way of getting somewhere, but as a whole thing in itself. I quite often would drive the long way round just because I’m not ready to arrive yet.
My beloved Honda Type R was that kind of car. Ok, so it’s not an Aston (insert your dream car of choice), but if you know, you know. I drove it for years. Loved it, always.
As much as I loved it, I had an open relationship. Me, my Type R and my local forecourt. Same pump. Always. Same poor imitation of a flat white from the machine inside. Same routine: pull-in, fill-up, back on the road. The car gave me immense joy and the forecourt enabled that, maybe not the same romantic connection, obviously, but a reliable and stable partner in this three-way relationship. We spent time together every week. They were always there for me and gave me what I needed. It worked.
Then the unexpected happened. Another turned my eye from my beloved Type R. I switched to an EV.
I never imagined I’d enjoy it as much as I do. I was wrong about that. But when the relationship ended with my Type R and the EV arrived, something else shifted too. I changed. My needs changed. But the sad thing is, the forecourt never noticed, or seemed to understand.
“We had a good run. Genuinely. But I changed, and you carried on exactly as before.”
My primary need from the forecourt was no longer my favourite pump or the crappy coffee. I still pass forecourts, still stop at them, but want different things from them. It’s like a friendship that drifted when one person’s life moves on and the other one hasn’t registered that anything is different.
And it’s not like I stayed quiet. I told them. The data was there to see. Every transaction, every visit, every Tuesday for three years, and then suddenly, the fuel purchases stopped. The dwell time increased, because charging takes 25 minutes rather than four and I was coming inside for longer. The basket changed. My entire relationship with the forecourt changed.
“Every Friday, the petrol price alert. Save 3p per litre this weekend. Every. Single. Friday. I haven’t bought petrol in three years. You don’t know me at all.”
This is the challenge for fuel retail loyalty, and the EV transition is making it impossible to ignore.
The customers switching to electric aren’t disappearing. They’re changing. And the change matters commercially, because an EV driver spending 25 minutes at a forecourt while they charge is a fundamentally different proposition to a petrol driver who is in and out in four minutes. Those 25 minutes are an opportunity. A chance to be chosen rather than to be simply convenient. A chance to sell an experience rather than a commodity.
But only if you can see who is actually standing in front of you.
When I stop at a forecourt now, what I’m looking for may be different, but it’s embarrassingly simple. A genuinely good coffee. Somewhere comfortable to sit in pleasant surroundings. Space to walk the dog without feeling like I’m in the way. A reason to have chosen this particular stop over the one ten miles down the road. Twenty-five minutes that feel like a choice rather than an inconvenience.
“I wanted to spend more time with you, but you were always in such a hurry.”
It’s such a fundamental mismatch. It’s a relationship deal breaker. The forecourt was built for the four-minute visit: efficient, transactional, optimised for throughput. The EV driver is asking for something it was never designed to give. And while the traditional players are still optimising the four-minute experience and sending fuel promotions to customers who no longer fill up, a different kind of business is being built around the ones they’re failing to see.
These new players in town are not adapting the old petrol station model. They’re starting from scratch, with the EV driver in mind. The coffee is good. The food is worth stopping for. The charging is fast, the seating is comfortable, and the whole place is built around the idea that lingering is the point, not a problem.
“Someone else noticed me. Understood my needs. And they built something specifically for who I am now, not who I used to be.”
This is the conversation the fuel retail industry needs to have, not about EV charging infrastructure, but about what loyalty actually means when the transaction changes. The customer hasn’t left. They’ve evolved. And the question is whether the programme can, and will, evolve with them.
The data to do this exists in every major fuel retail business right now. The signals are there: the absence of fuel purchases, the longer visits, the shift in what is being bought inside. A well-built loyalty infrastructure surfaces those signals and does something with them. It knows that the Tuesday regular is now an EV driver. It knows what they buy, how long they stay, and what would make them choose you over the forecourt that was built specifically to win them.
Most loyalty programmes don’t seem to know any of that. They’re still running a scheme for a customer who no longer exists in the same form.
“Yes, it was me, I admit. I changed. But you didn’t seem to like who I have become.”
I want to be clear about something.
I didn’t leave you.
I still drive past. I still stop sometimes. I’m still here, still capable of being the kind of customer I always was, maybe more so, actually, if you just give me a reason. The person who used to fill up at pump 3 is now someone with 25 minutes and a dog and a need for a genuinely good flat white, and all of those things are still yours if you want them.
But you’d have to see me first. Not who I was. Who I am now.
Look at the data. Find me in it. Build something around this version of me, not the one who filled up at pump 3 every Tuesday without fail.
Yours, with complicated feelings and 40 miles of range left,
Jamie
P.S. If you’d like to understand what your loyalty data is actually telling you about how your customers are changing, and what that means for your programme, that’s exactly the conversation we have with fuel retail teams. Just get in touch.
