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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty shocking that all the charge networks are getting rug pulled because they couldn't figure out how to accept payment reliably.

I wonder if Tesla has figured that out for third-party automobiles yet. (I mean, I assume they have, but I assumed the other charge networks would be able to obtain working credit card readers, and that definitely didn't happen.)

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The plug is more about combining DC and AC pins, payment is orthogonal. The difference between "NACS" and "Tesla" is that because Europe has mandated CCS, Tesla has made their connectors talk CCS because global simplicity.

Yes, Tesla's will still have plug-to-pay, but that's on top of NACS, not part of NACS. NACS is just CCS with a different (smaller) handle.

The Technology Connections guy made a good explainer about all this the other day, if you don't mind a slightly-get-off-my-lawn youtuber persona: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjny4u5THpU

> The Technology Connections guy made a good explainer about all this the other day, if you don't mind a slightly-get-off-my-lawn youtuber persona: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjny4u5THpU

That persona is part of TC's schtick, but the video itself was major cringe. TC does not like Tesla, and watching him forcibly eating crow + that persona that comes across as "I am right, even when I was very wrong" = 50 painful minutes.

IMO the non-Tesla networks thoroughly misunderstood the market. People are willing to drive, specifically, to a Tesla charging station because they have the biggest network (and they’re fairly reliable, but anyone could achieve that). Other than that, there is no particular network effect, and drivers don’t want a network effect. Drivers want a charger at a convenient location that works, but there is no more inherent brand loyalty than there is with gas stations.

So, to compete effectively, chargers should have deployed in useful locations and made charging convenient. Using gas station-style card readers would have worked fine, and they are a mature technology. No one needs to install an app or create an account to buy gas, and charging should have worked the same way.

The lack of innovation in payment technologies is a huge barrier. It should be entirely feasible to "set up a payment card" within a secure computing system like a car's computer (perhaps using an inexpensive commodity secure enclave processor), and then securely pay for charging services over an arbitrary wire protocol like NACS/CCS without the need to make an account for each provider. Apple and Google each managed to realize a similar functionality for NFC, but it took their enormous market power (and a huge mess of technical innovation that should have come from the payment card industry directly, rather than requiring still more proprietary systems.) In Europe they had to create an entirely new payment overlay called Plug & Charge, but it only handles that one application (and doesn't exist in the US.)

A good chunk of the problems in charging stem from the fact that we allowed basic infrastructure like payments to be locked up within these private companies, rather than mandating standards.

If only there were some kind of ... card ... that asserted you had ... credit...

we could call it a "credit card"

I would settle for the basics before insisting on actual innovation. I also want chargers to allow using a credit card (or Apple Pay or whatever) as an alternative to whatever is programmed into the car.

Sure. What I'm describing is essentially Apple Pay, just not limited to mobile phones and an NFC interface. If the payment card industry had looked a decade forward and developed something like Apple Pay for IoT devices, then you could enter a credit card to your car and it would make the payment directly over the charging cable. They didn't do this, and as a result we have to use NFC, magstripes, proprietary wire protocols, or else live in Europe. It's a bummer.

Europe uses the same CCS payment exchange protocol for EV charging payment communication as the US.

Yes. But this isn’t a general payment protocol that the payment industry developed to facilitate convenient payment applications. It’s an application-specific protocol that had to be developed at enormous cost for the specific application of charging and only really happened because EU regulators pushed very hard on charging companies and manufacturers to realize it. The US gets to benefit from it (if we’re lucky) because Europe did the work, although it’s not supported by Tesla and many of the smaller charging services don’t support it.

My point is that a IoT payment protocol should have been a part of the EMV standard, the same one that lets me use my credit card while overseas. We shouldn’t have to rely on such a huge government-backed effort specific to every specific business sector where a device might need to pay for a service.

> and doesn't exist in the US.

It does exist and I've used it many times. Its the exact same protocol.

Yes I just learned it’s supported by EA. But not by some of the other charging services.

Luckily all the CCS chargers I've charged at which were installed within the last year or so had regular credit card terminals which I could pay with phone tap to pay or EMV chipped cards.

The CCS chargers here all have those, but they don't work at Electrify America, evGo, ChargePoint or the smaller networks kiosks I've seen.

The one counterexample was that I found an EA terminal with a working credit card reader, but it did not work reliably.

For instance, you had to tap Visa, but insert chip for MC, and swipe Amex (I might have those constraints wrong), and if you did the wrong thing, the charge circuit computer state machine would get confused with the unexpected payment error, and put your car computer into a "busted charger" timeout mode. A re-attempt would cause most CC companies to issue a fraud lockout for that kiosk.

Also, these issues were compounded by the CCS connector EA uses being a bit out of mechanical tolerance, so the machine has a sign saying to pull up during handshake to get the computers to talk.

The same EA kiosks work reasonably well (> 90% success on first handshake) if you pay with the app.

I just used one at an evgo station that worked with a chipped Visa card the other day. I had another time a few weeks ago with tap to pay Visa through Google Wallet.

I've used chipped cards at Chargepoint work on many occasions.

And I've never had a plug and charge session fail at EA.

In my experience, I couldn't trust those chargers to not fail at some point charging when I was away from my car eating lunch or walking around a park. The reliability was just a huge pain in the rear.

In my experience, I never had a single time where the charging got interrupted nor have I had any other kind of other failure to charge properly on my car.

I live in LA where chargers are very used so it's probably just a matter of the locale you're in.

I've had chargers fail at:

* EVGo at Warner Center

* The greenlots at The LADWP on Ventura and Corbin(ish)

* Flo at reseda and oxnard

* Blink or whatever at Kaiser and DeSoto

* Blink at the Ikea and burbank

To name a few. Tons more floating around in my head between my two EVs. Every single one of them likes to fail at some arbitrary time when I'm far away from my car

Also uptime/availability.

What is nice about the Tesla charging map is that I can see how many slots are available so I don’t drive somewhere only to find out the charger is in use or broken.

The other networks have that too, fwiw. Though, for some, there is a big red "emergency stop" button that people can press, and it incorrectly marks the charger as broken.

So, the map will incorrectly tell you not to use that charger.

Good.

All these unreliable fragmented networks that think they're precious enough to demand downloading a crappy app and registration deserve to go out of business.

When my car needs 20 minutes to recharge, I hate spending 15 minutes fighting someone's dumb password policy just to start charging.

In EU there's Ionity and Fastned that always work and always accept contactless payments.

They probably could figure it out. I don't think that was the point though, at least in Canada.

It felt more like all of the chargers networks wanted to become something more like of Japan's prepaid IC card system for the trains. I think their dream was to have drivers buy into a reoccurring subscription for super charger access, and become big enough to be the One Charger Network to Rule Them All.

Whether this new announcement changes anything for the Canadian charging networks, I don't know. Some of the operators had already entered into cross subscription agreements with each other to try and alleviate the pain points. Part of me thinks that they'll run to the federal government and ask for protection against Tesla's network if they view it as too great a threat, but they could also end up playing nice with with each other as well.

Next few years is going to be interesting to watch either way.

So far as I read it, NACS chargers use the exact same "Plug-and-Charge" standards that CCS tried to adopt but for dumb (compatibility) reasons made "optional" (leading to a lot of buggy half-implementations). The fix seems to be that the NACS standard changes it from "optional" to "required" and with access to Tesla's Supercharger network in the US as a carrot that should mean a lot more well tested implementations among the other manufacturers than previously existed for CCS1.

"pretty shocking that all the charge networks are getting rug pulled because they couldn't figure out how to accept payment reliably."

Is there a reference for this somewhere? I didn't know this was a problem.

Ford's press release cited a study where they had paid drivers go to random Blue Oval (their charge affiliate network) chargers and see whether they could charge or not. They said this was the main reason they were adopting the tesla standard.

Anecdotally, 90% of the time I've been unable to charge at a Blue Oval certified network (I drive a BMW, but the list of networks is well-known), it has been a payment issue, not a CCS issue.

Also, the Biden administration recognized that this was a problem, and built a payment availability SLA into the inflation reduction act.

It’s not. I drive a CCS car. The reason EA and EVGo are getting demolished is due to the comically limited number of chargers they install per station (four commonly vs dozens at Tesla stations) and the unreliability of the chargers themselves. I’ve never had a problem with payment.

This is the big one for me, too. I've driven non-Tesla and Tesla EVs for years, and the big draw of the supercharger stations is that there's so many stalls that there's always one open. When I roadtrip with the CCS car, I get lucky when there's one of the four stalls available.

Nothing more frustrating than going to a full charger with a line and driving over to another place that's open just for it to charge your card but fail to initialize.

I don't think the payment was the main issue, it's always been the overall reliability of the chargers not being great.

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