Looking ahead

Press, 7 February 1985, Page 28

Looking ahead

Alternative fuels, such as CNG and LPG, will not amount to more than 15 per cent of the product sold across service station forecourts by 1990 in the opinion of Shell’s automotive retail business manager Britishborn Gavin Choyce, who is about to leave Shell New Zealand to take up an appointment with the multinational in London.

“You are still looking at a market which will be driven primarily by motor spirit,” he was quoted as saying in a company newletter. Mr Choyce believes that electronics is going to have a dramatic effect on oil company business in the future.

He said that the electronic revolution was going to produce a society in which plastic credit cards and debit cards would become a regular method of carrying out transactions. “This has enormous implications for the way in which business will be conducted at retail outlets in future,” he said.

However, the other side of the electronic revolution

was how it would affect communications between oil companies and their outlets. “For instance, the facility is, in theory, already available whereby our outlets can be on-line to our depots,” he said. “It will soon be possible to place electronic sensors in a filling station’s tanks which will give the depot information as to the actual level of product in those tanks. A whole mass of information from those filling stations will, therefore, become accessible to us sitting here at head office or the branches.”

Quoting as an example Shell’s Belgian company, Mr Choyce said its retail manager had access to any filling station in the country when he was in his office and he could find out immediately daily, weekly, monthly or annual sales.

“The ability to obtain that information is a fantastic opportunity and is one reason why I believe the electronics revolution will be the major change in the New Zealand automotive retail scene over the coming years,” he said.