Talking petrol pumps

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33442, 25 January 1974, Page 14

Talking petrol pumps

Now something unusual from Britain’s countryside: a petrol pump that talks to you.

The reason for this unexpected loquaciousness is the sad fact that people don’t won’t or can’t read and follow instructions for using the automatic pumps that accept a banknote or coin, and measure out that money’s worth of petrol for you. There are many funny stories —an old lady, for instance, removed the filler “gun” from the pump, put a banknote up the spout, and then shouted: “Ten litres please.” BP has had similar experiences in Germany, and any petrol-automat owner will tell you many more stories. Hence the pump that talks to you. It leads you, step by step, through the right sequence to get your petrol. You simply push a button, and the recording tells you what to do, from feeding the note or the coin into the machine, right through to switching off the pump when you’ve finished, and putting back the car’s filler cap before driving off. Teaching machine This was first the idea of a Welsh filling station owner who, with the help of local

electronics experts, set up a complex system which, like a teaching machine, led the user through each operation, leaving out instructions or moving on to the next when an operation was done correctly, and taking the user back over things that weren’t done properly. But BP is now experimenting with something much simpler and cheaper—tape-recor-ded sequence of instructions timed carefully to give the impression to the average user that the machine is following what he’s doing, whereas, in fact, it’s not. Simplicity should bring cheapness and reliability.

At present. Electrosonics Ltd, which makes audio-visual equipment and electronic control systems, estimates that the most of adding production models of a recorded instruction machine to an existing automat pump, needn’t be more than about £2OO.

Experiments with the talking pump suggest that this would be recovered within a few months to a year, through avoiding refunds and lost sales. After that, the talking pump could well be said to be charming money out of customers for nothing.