Helpful or stupid? China introduces robot petrol pumps [Video]

Filling a car with petrol is a pretty simple process; pull up at bowser, open filler cap, insert nozzle, pump petrol, pay, go. Takes maybe three minutes, tops, and with minimal effort on your part.

So if ever there was a process that doesn’t need automation, filling your car with fuel would rank right up there.

But that hasn’t stopped Sinopec, one of China’s largest producers of oil and gas and the second-largest petrol retailer in the world, from reinventing the wheel.

Sinopec began trialling its robotic fuel fillers in 2021, using one of its petrol stations in the city of Nanning in China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, as a real-world test bed.

While the act of you or I pumping some petrol into our cars is relatively simple, Sinopec’s robotic …