Last I heard filling up a gas tank costs way more in Europe than in the US. Yet for my high-fuel-efficiency (for a non-hybrid) car this week, I filled up on $50. So it would have been a lot more at an EMV-only PoS kiosk at an unmanned gas station. (Of course, now that I know this, I shouldn't let my gas tank go anywhere near empty in Europe.)
Ah, but what I forget to mention is, I don't care how much I can get day after day, because my bank charges me a steep fee for using an ATM at another bank (which of course I have to do, because my bank has no presence in Europe!). So I want to get my cash for the whole trip once if at all possible, which limits me to $300 or $500 or whatever for the whole trip. Now, in this case, I don't want to start "splurging" with the cash left and right early in the trip because that increases the risk that I'll run out. Also, aside from the fee, I've often had problems in Europe (in small towns, at least) where in one town there's one bank and it doesn't take my ATM card, and I have to go on to another town and find a different brand bank where my ATM card will work.

Also, I wouldn't mind so much getting much more cash than I need if I were in the EuroZone, since I can always save it for my next trip to another EuroZone country. But in case you missed it, I was asking about Hungary (Eastern Europe) when you answered about Western Europe, and Hungary is not official EuroZone (rather their own Forint), and so since this is quite likely to be my only ever trip to Hungary, any cash that's left over I'll have to convert back, and lose more money there.

I drive on maybe about 1/2 of my trips to Europe, and never with a local. (So far I've driven in Spain, Denmark, Ireland, UK, and Norway, and next month I'll be driving in Hungary. I've never been strandded because of swipe unacceptance, but I have had to try several gas stations in a row sometimes before finding one that would take my card. And "in a row" in rural Europe means in different towns many kilometers apart.)

But I've never heard of this option of buying a prepaid gas card locally (I don't recall anyone else mentioning it in this thread before, even though in the early days of this thread lots of the discussion was about the unmanned gas stations issue). Can you please explain a bit more where one finds these?

At any rate, there's also another solution, which is to keep plenty of gas in the car all the time, gassing up when you see a manned gas station whether you "need to" or not. Then you'll never be needing gas when only unmanned stations are around.

But that's the thing: There tend to be solutions when you're aware of the problem, aware of what types of places you might run into this problem, and have given some thought (or read suggestions) about how to work around the problem. Ie, for those people who've been reading this thread for a while, at least they're somewhat prepared. But there's a lot of travelers (including a lot of FTers) who will run into this issue before they've seen this thread, or who don't have the time (or whatever) to use the "workaround" solutions we've talking about here.

But beyond the absolute "no acceptance", keep in mind that there's a much more common occurence of simply inconvenience. A gas station where with a chip&pin card I could pay at the pump, but instead I have to go inside, wait in line, explain that I only have swipe card, get the pump enabled, go back out and pump, go back in and pay. And at some train stations I can't use the convenient kiosks but have to stand in long lines to use the few human tellers, sometimes to only find out that I stood in the wrong line. The "no acceptance at all" cases I know of I've read about in this thread (gas stations in France on the weekend, for example, but I haven't yet driven in France myself). I've been "lucky" so far, but I'd still love a chip&pin card so I could save time on my trip and "stop worrying" about one thing.