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Comment by amluto | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

we could call it a "credit card"

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.

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