Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

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I've driven through Germany last summer, tried 3 different charging stations, none of them worked. Or rather, they did, but I couldn't set up the app for them, one because it didn't have an English option, one because it wouldn't accept my non-German card and another because it was giving me an extremely helpful "unspecified" error. But even here in UK it's a mess. There is a charging station near my home that seems to be out of order 90% the time. There is another one where I can't set up an account and their customer support is non existent. Funnily enough the best experiences I ever had with charging stations in the UK were always at Shell charging stations - plug in, tap your payment card on the side, done. No apps, no stupid fobs or anything, it's easier than paying for petrol. I really do think that legislation should come in to force all providers to accept card payment at the charger, even if the cost is higher(offer discount to account holders, but at least let me pay even without an account)

Charging in much of Europe is really not a great experience. It's a fragmented market, different electricity providers (this matters, some chargers really want you to be a customer of a specific electricity provider, some just offer different prices depending on this), different charging networks, different plugs, different apps and payment methods, different behavior even if you're seemingly in the same network, wildly different prices, etc.

Every app shows different chargers and different status on whether they're occupied or not. Most are broken anyway. Some are on hotel or supermarket grounds so they're accessible only to some people, and even in the same network might have a different price because the owner of the land asks for a cut (yes, that's a thing). Some are inside a parking lot so you pay the parking on top of the charging. Some are on a free parking spot for EVs so someone will park there all day. Some charge per KWh, per minute, or a combination, plus maybe another one time fee.

Chargers need to be as ubiquitous as gas stations, and provide an experience that's just as frictionless. Drive in, pick a plug and start fast charging, get a maximum allotted time to charge, then pay like you'd do in any store, or better yet have the car talk to the charger and handle this for you (ISO 15118) and be on your way. Alternatively, to take advantage of how different electricity is from gas and maybe also use those cars as electricity storage, governments could invest to put charging points on every street parking, in every streetlight, etc.

This sounds like an opportunity for an independent app unifying all of those and gathering/displaying real usability data. I don't think it could make official app stores due to having to reverse-engineer payment APIs of others, but... maybe something open-source and side-loaded?

This exists, it's called plugsurfing [1]. They do charge a 10% surplus though.

[1] https://www.plugsurfing.com/home

Ugh, card payments in Germany, for non-Germans, is generally a nightmare anyway. It's a bummer that it's not a solved problem for EV charging, because in many ways, I think the EU is ahead of the US in (non-Tesla) charging infra.

What's the problem with card payments in germany for non-germans?

Credit cards are not widely accepted in Germany. Germans generally use cash or EC/Maesto debit cards, and you can't get an EC card if you're not an EU resident with an EU bank account (which can be hard for Americans, and, to a lesser extent, any foreigner, I'm sure).

I used to have a Maestro-branded debit card (in the US) when I was younger. I have no idea if it's the same system and/or if they're compatible. I checked my wallet and my current debit card has no Maestro branding.

I've more than once found myself halfway through a meal before realizing that I might not have a way to pay for it.

https://www.german-way.com/germanys-cash-culture-geld-stinkt...

We need the Google Fi equivalent of credit cards. Even with vaunted "international credit cards", there are still use cases where they do not work, which seem country-specific, and finding information about what is actually going on under the hood has been difficult for this layperson.

With the caveat that I've only travelled in the Western world, credit cards really are almost universally accepted, Germany aside. Obviously, the smaller the merchant, and the smaller the country/town, the less likely.

As an American, a particularly odd experience was at a shop in Peru, where they only accepted MasterCard and not Visa. These days we're so used to them being interchangeable, it had never even crossed my mind. Between my wife and I, we had 5 or 6 Visa debit/credit cards, and 0 MasterCard.

Exceptions abound in Asia, though there are far fewer exceptions in the West.

For example in Taiwan, in their online grocery ecosystem all the market participants use the same kind of SMS verification step that is intercepted at the card network stage (the issuing bank doesn't see this activity). So Visa and MasterCard both generate the challenge, but US card holders do not see this, and US customer support does not know what to do on the back end to support it.

I know somewhere, there is some kind of setting that interfaces with for example, Visa International, but only a credit card industry domain expert with the lingo would know the right words. I suspect I need a Chip and PIN EMV card issued, and it drops to SMS for certain online transaction types, but that's just a WAG at this time.

I've run into similar exceptions elsewhere in transactions that require some kind of national ID number tied to a delivery address for higher-value orders.

The types of risk profiles associated with many new use cases is fracturing credit card handling, but the use cases international travelers encounter is so small it isn't worth addressing just for that demographic. However, as the Net continues to bleed international transactions across borders (AliBaba is just the beginning), I think this will be a very lucrative market for the first-mover to do the Uber-like Herculean work of addressing every jurisdiction's concerns to put them all under a next-generation credit card.

I've been paying with my phone using Google Pay connected to PayPal for the past year. It works basically everywhere, except for places that only take cash.

The problem I had specifically was that the app expected a German billing address to add a card, which obviously I couldn't provide.

MasterCard owns Maestro, so would MasterCards work there?

No, they don't.

"But even here in UK it's a mess."

I cannot parse that.

Try adding the word "the" in every spot, and report back when you find the right one. Hint: sentence.split()[3:4]

Sorry, not a native English speaker, but let me know what I can do to help.

He he.

You missed the joke, expected.

"Even" in the UK? The UK is a basket case right now. HAs been since the GFC, and was shaky from about 1947.

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