Gas Delivery Straight to Your Vehicle. What Could Go Wrong?

Eric Newcomer reports in Bloomberg on the sudden rise of new services promising to deliver gasoline to your vehicle wherever you are. Concerned city and fire officials in cities including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Palo Alto, and Nashville worry about trucks roaming the street with large tanks of gas. Competing fuel start-ups, including Yoshi, Purple, and WeFuel, are maneuvering through a series of regulatory hurdles as they seek to disrupt the ubiquitous gas station business model.

The California government agency that oversees the state’s fire marshals office is convening a meeting on May 24 to discuss mobile fueling. It doesn't believe the startups’ current operations “meet the requirements to be able to operate safely,” said Lynne Tomachoff , a spokeswoman for the agency. “There are so many tentacles to this whole issue.”

Meanwhile, the start-ups see fuel delivery as a response to the increasing costs of opening and operating a gas station, which are increasingly being pushed out for more valuable real estate development.