Hacker News Reader

Comment by matthewdgreen | Hacker News Reader

> No I don't want your application. I don't want to create an account. Let me use my debit card and don't ask me on anything.

I agree about this. But we now have a direct-to-car billing standard (as part of the CCS/NACS standards) that should solve this, it's just a question of manufacturers and network operators getting their crap together and deploying it.

View on HN

Direct-to-car billing would be even less acceptable. Chargers should let you use a credit card without having to involve an account anywhere, be it on a phone app or on the car.

That still involves the credit card account. It's not really "not involving an account" until you can pay cash.

True, but that's an account you already have and is independent of the products and services, so using it for this doesn't make anything worse.

How will direct to car billing work for rental cars? Am I going to get randomly billed weeks after I return the car?

Just let me pay for my fuel at the point of purchase with whatever card I choose. I may have a corporate card that it is appropriate to pay with vs my personal card. Pay at the pump has been a solved problem for the entirety of the 21st century. There is no reason to "fix" it.

I was randomly billed for tolls up to 6 weeks after I had a rental car for a multi state trip, so yeah, that's probably what they would do.

Hell, there are more gas stations around me going card only these days. Unfortunately the cash only world of the past is slowly dying in many places.

You mean there is no attendant you can go in and say "$20 on pump 8" and hand them cash???

Could you not buy a drink or snack at these stations either?

Direct-to-car billing in the age of subscriptions is indeed very unwise.

We have activated heated seats of your car for 9.99EUR/month. Oh did you missed that notification and noticed it after a year from your bank history? Well sucks to be you.

I don't disagree with the concept of letting people use a credit card. I'd just prefer people to enter it on their car's on-screen interface, rather than assuming physical card readers at every charging point. Leaving aside the annoyance factor (fumbling with cards and bending down to feed one into the curb each time I park), we're eventually going to have millions of charging points on random walls, curbs and lamposts. Based on my experience with today's chargers, the card readers are uniformly the first item to fail. And they never get fixed.

> I'd just prefer people to enter it on their car's on-screen interface

I know I'm more -- ahem -- cautious than most, but I'd be very nervous about entering any sensitive data like that into a car's data system. I'm not even comfortable connecting my phone to a car via bluetooth.

It wouldn't necessarily be a showstopper for me, but I would certainly want to see others use such a system for a few years before I started to, to be reasonably confident that the car wasn't helpfully storing my payment details for me or passing them along to an entity not involved with the transaction.

Why is it so tough to just accept cash or card in exchange for goods, without any app or any other account? We do it all the time. It's not hard.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com