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Comment by akouri | Hacker News Reader

Tap & Pay with a ccard still requires you to fiddle with a station and slows you down. If you are plugging in at home (which is our target market), the fewer interactions needed the better. Imagine every time you get home you need to take your wallet out, tap the machine, wait for some 3rd party api to talk to the charger in the dimly lit basement, and then and only then you can leave. This is like 30 seconds of your day wasted.

Plus, ultimately we want to make charging as cheap as possible and having to pay the $.30 interchange fee each time a user plugs in would add a ton of overhead to our cost model.

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This would be infinitely better than the current model, where you have to install a bullshit app, which doesn’t work over 20% of the time.

I’d happily pay $0.30 per charge session to just use standard NFC or chip payments.

Also, why in god’s name would I have authentication on my home charger?

> Also, why in god’s name would I have authentication on my home charger?

Not everyone in the US lives in a single family home

But if you have a dedicated spot, then the problem is still solved.

Surely this could be dealt with by accepting a "membership card" over NFC. I'm sure my dad has a token for the parking barriers at his place of work which can also take direct card payments.

As an added bonus, when you have family or friends visiting they can pay to charge as normal (at presumably a slightly less attractive rate).

Currently, I just plug into my friends’ charger, and it goes on their electric bill.

I usually bring 10x the dollar value of the charge in booze and food, so it doesn’t matter.

Also, they don’t have to stress out over trying to figure out how to pair my car to their house and charge me $5 while they’re trying to plate dinner and deal with their kids.

If they cared about the $5 (or if I had a hummer and they had a DC fast charger, so it was $20-50) I’d happily pay cash or apple pay or venmo or really any option other than authenticating with their landlord.

That makes sense that the use case in a shared home lot is different than out and about, but still doesn't obviously suggest payment routing over the charger - wouldn't monthly billing be better from the consumers point of view? You'd only need a car identifier for that.

Yes, to your point the Plug & Charge mechanism is just for authentication. Through our integrations with Yardi, Buildium, etc. payment can just be taken out of rent or tacked onto the sub-metered utility bill.

Gotcha, that makes sense.

How do you handle for example visitor spots (e.g. one off charge) in a multi-family unit?

If it’s a multi-family home system, why not just use contactless badges/fobs to identify each family? When you move in you sign the contract, give your bank details and get a fob. Then just badge with the fob to charge

Not a bad idea. Will look into it!

The only EVs I've used are the hire-from-the-street ones available in some cities in Europe. There's generally a small credit (free minutes) if you leave them charging at the end of a trip. There are RFID tags in the car to activate the charger — I assume it's essentially equivalent to a company credit card used to buy petrol, or when you hire an ICE car with fuel included and there's a special credit card in the glovebox to use to pay for the petrol.

E.g. https://www.greenmobility.com/dk/en/faq/

In that case they often already have a fob to enter shared (secured) parking anyway, that also works on doors, and is registered with the building management...

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