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Comment by jakobegger | Hacker News Reader

I really don't get why all the charging networks in Europe require you to sign up, get a card, download an app, etc. It's ridiculous. My sister drives an electric car, they have 5 cards from different charging networks, and she still struggles to find a charger that actually lets her charge.

Every gas station accepts normal debit and credit cards. There is no gas station that requires you to sign up before filling your tank. It is ridiculous.

Why can't the charging networks just install a normal credit/debit card reader and let people pay with their normal cards? It's mind-boggling.

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I really don't get why all the charging networks in Europe require you to sign up, get a card, download an app, etc. It's ridiculous.

2019's "sign up, get a card, download an app" is like 1990's "Leave your name and contact information. Our sales people will contact you."

I was shocked the other day to see a water dispensing ... thing, that required you to download an app. An app. For water that is free from another very similar water dispensing thing call a tap!

Is it possible this exists to prevent homeless people from using it?

Found it! It's an app called "Chill H2O" and the company is https://chill.net.au/

Make of them what you will

Homeless people don't deserve water?

Well, in Verona, Italy, a few years ago the mayor installed benches with an armrest to make it harder for homeless people to sleep on them [1]. His party (Lega) is now (practically speaking) leading Italy. I wouldn't be surprised if many people would be in favor of forbidding black migrants from "stealing our water".

/rant

Sorry for the OT.

[1] http://www.veramente.org/images/users/veramente/2013_panchin...

It's called hostile design[1] and is not specific to Italian cities.

[1] https://99percentinvisible.org/article/unpleasant-design-dis...

Edited to add this link : https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/unpleasant-design-hos...

This unfortunately happens all the time, it's called hostile architecture. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_architecture

I didn’t say I supported it

Homeless people don’t have smartphones?

I would imagine that within the class of homeless people, undesirability in public area correlates with likelihood of having no phone?

If I were homeless, a smartphone would be near the top of my list of useful things to have. I'm not sure your correlation holds...

I imagine it would. If you read again I’m trying to distinguish people who are homeless and people who are mentally ill, filthy, and verbally threatening homeless. I don’t think we should restrict people’s access to water, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if this was a motivation. I would bet that the least desirable people in society don’t have smartphones generally.

More likely a bunch of overfunded, SV nitwits sent a very successful sales rep

> If you read again I’m trying to distinguish people who are homeless and people who are mentally ill, filthy, and verbally threatening homeless.

You do not seem to have made that distinction anywhere in your comments.

If there were a group most likely to not have a smartphone, homeless people likely surpass those who willfully give them up.

Homeless people almost always have a smartphone, and can usually tell you where the best free WiFi locations are.

I don't think there is any correlation at all between having a phone and desirability.

Im not homeless and I wouldn't be able to use it.

> 1990's

There are many sites like that on the internet today. Ever had to buy enterprise software?

Those products typically go right to the end of my list.

For what it's worth, that's exactly what they want you to do if you're only casually interested in the product.

There are other ways to accomplish that.

NB: I said other, not better.

https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/7tojtidef_l4r_sdbringw

Well, I know of a couple that lost the chance of participating in some government specs because they had such sites and were hard to reach.

"Casually interested" can mean a lot of things, all look the same to the seller.

I find this interesting. Don't you want to spread knowledge about and sympathy for your product as wide as possible to get a good base of advocates, eventually reaching decision makers? (See: Student licenses, open source and such)

Totally depends on the product. OSS? Social? Consumer? Media? Sure! Enterprise/Productivity? Not as much.

What you want is your sales team following high probability of conversion leads.

If I make you jump through a few hoops just to talk to a sales person, then I've already weeded out most of the people who wouldn't buy it anyway.

Or download Docker... :P

>Leave your name and contact information. Our sales people will contact you.

This happens far too often in 2019 as well.

It absolutely does, but the businesses that work that way are dinosaurs run by people with a 1970s mindset.

Not necessarily.

I recently purchased software to the tune of ~AUD$25k, where downloading and installing a trial version makes almost no sense given the target audience: laser cutter, where each model of machine from any specific manufacturer can have a slightly different dialect of G-Code, and this type of software is often way too complicated for the average operator to nut.

So I sent a couple of emails and got swift responses and screen-sharing demos from both companies I contacted.

The sorts of programs I can download a trial version of and have running in half an our or so are nowhere near as mature as the products we short listed.

So I'm going to suggest it depends a lot on the target audience. When you're handing over multiple tens of thousands for a semi-bespoke software package management, in my experience, typically require interaction with a sales agent. This is in the context of physical industry, I can't speak for the software world, where perhaps spending multiple tends of thousands on online services is common? I have no idea.

It all depends on the product. Once you start getting into niche products which cost thousands or tens of thousands per year to use, the assumption is that the customer is a serious business with funding that has a known problem to solve. There will be a much smaller number of approaches than with a cheap consumer facing product and a conversion is worth a lot, so it makes sense to pair prospective customers with a domain specialist / sales person immediately to tailor the pitch to the specific candidate, modify the solution as necessary to fit the customer's needs, and make sure they are happy.

> Leave your name and contact information. Our sales people will contact you.

What would be the right way?

How about turn up, NFC/swipe and plug in. Not customer experience should be "improved" by an app.

Or insert credit card.

Or one of the many collect call phone numbers.

progress doesn't solve the 'we need money, thus we need clients'; it's a game of whack-a-mole..

Venture capital.

Selling electricity for money is not exciting. It's a simple and relatively low-margin commodity transaction. It's not going to create a unicorn. Making the transaction more complicated and collecting a bunch of user data increases the bullshit surface area for your pitch deck. If you're vague enough about what your business model really is, you might just fool someone into thinking that you can make them a whole bunch of money.

Because they can't harvest your information if you don't sign up for stuff.

Couldn't a card number be tokenized in some way so as to allow for tracking?

I dont think so, this would probably go against PCI DSS.

Most payment gateways offer a card fingerprinting feature. Here’s Stripe’s: https://stripe.com/docs/api/cards/object#card_object-fingerp....

It’s fine with PCI DSS as long as it is not reversible.

Stripe and Square both identify consumers by their unique CC numbers. If I swipe my card on a square reader, it recognizes me and asks if I want a receipt sent to my phone or email, even if I’ve never purchased from that vendor before.

The whole point of tokenizing is to get rid of PCI problems on CC analysis and testing, as I understand it.

Is there credit card tokenization services from which you can get a token identifying permanently a card without the possibility to make a payment?

Yes, most PSPs do this. E.g. Stripe calls it a fingerprint. It's only valid for your merchant ID (i.e. if we both signed up for Stripe and swiped the same card, we'd get different fingerprints).

https://stripe.com/docs/api/tokens/create_card (notice the request has no charge, but the response contains a fingerprint).

To state the obvious: it's not determinstic outside of Stripe, and there's no way to revert it, or even iterate over all CC numbers and brute force the space. You'd need Stripe's secret, e.g. assuming they use HMAC.

Not really. I work with payment processing, I've got the partially obscured credit card number, usually the name and the location. Plus a bunch of other info.

I've seen several deterministic tokenizers for payment cards.

Where there done by the payment processor like Artemis2 or in house?

I'm asking because I saw a lot of in-house tokenizer with hashes or deterministic encryption that could get reversed in a few seconds by brute force since the space to cover is so small.

Tokenized? One-way digest: SHA-512 the card number, iterate SHA-512 on the results 100 times, store that as your tracking code.

No. With 10^12 possible account numbers and a hash rate of ~10^10 H/s using off the shelf hardware [1] it would only take 100*(10^12/10^10) = 10000 seconds to deanonymise the token.

[1] https://gist.github.com/epixoip/a83d38f412b4737e99bbef804a27...

With 10^12 possible account numbers, it should be relatively easy to build a rainbow table for tokens of any practical complexity.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

I would be completely unsurprised to find that other than having the data in some poorly secured database it isn't used for anything useful.

Never forget the corollary!

“...But don’t dismiss malice.” Dismissing reasonable concerns about a nearly universal practice is best done through reasoned argument, not aphorism.

To be pedantic, that's till harvesting your data, it's just not selling it.

Does that make it malicious and stupid?

I'm really surprised this was down voted so much. I really don't think it's all that controversial. Like so many websites require registration when you are almost guaranteed never to return.

I feel really bad for bobsmith@aol.com. He probably had to abandon that address years ago.

You should be aware that many malicious people feign incompetence when caught.

never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by profit motive.

If I may go a step further, usually gas stations also accept "normal" cash, which is even more normal (and BTW leaving less electronic traces) than "normal debit and credit cards".

Yeah, it would be awesome if you could just put a few Euro coins in a slot next to an outlet and it would let you take a couple of kWh. But dealing with physical cash is a hassle, so I understand why companies would prefer cards. We have a bunch of unattended gas stations around here, and you can't pay with cash there either.

Sure, everyone understands why companies would prefer cards, as a matter of fact companies would actually prefer to charge you € 1,000 (say) on 1st Jan of every year, and then reimburse whatever you haven't used/bought on the 31st of December, but here we are talking of what the customers would prefer.

At least here (Italy) it is unthinkable (yet) that a fuel station (attended or unattended) doesn't accept cash (besides Bancomat and debt/credit cards) (though all the petrol companies and the government is pushing for making everything digital, etc. like everywhere else).

Most self service petrol stations in Switzerland take card, as well as cash.

I think it heavily depends on the gas station.

For instance the cheapest chains (e.g. Total Access, Carrefour, Leclerc) often don't accept cash as there is most of the time no employee on premise, and they don't want to deal with vandalism.

In general France is progressively going away from cash. Using a credit card for super small transactions like buying bread at the bakery were deemed almost anti-social a few years ago, but more and more bakeries start to prefer it for speedier contact less payment for instance.

Even the us is super cumbersome. They should just support ApplePay, Google Pay and a credit card and be done with it.

Remembering the password for some finicky app just makes the quick fill up too much trouble.

Even better would be if the car had secure handshake so once you’ve registered once for a network, you can just plug in and be done.

> "They should just support ApplePay, Google Pay and a credit card and be done with it."

They should take cash.

With cash, what happens if I put in $5 and my car only uses $3 of electricity? Or if someone pulls out the charge cable after my car's only taken $1 of electricity?

With electronic payments, you can pre-authorize a reasonable amount, then charge the customer for the amount they've used - no excess charges or change required.

Wait, have you never paid cash at a gas station before?

You go up to the teller, tell him which pump your car is in, and get your $2 back.

Most car chargers are standalone devices in a parking lot. There is no teller to pay. I have never seen one with an attendant.

They could take cash automatically like a vending machine but that's going to require new staff to go around and collect money and deposit it. Probably much more expensive than taking credit cards.

Have the dispenser display a code for a $2 future credit. Or to be redeemed for cash at a later time somewhere cash transactions with humans exist. Or just use a standard vending machine module and give change with a restocking employee.

The market will decide if it's more expensive. Customers exist who will commute to another charger so they can pay cash. If the money left on the table is more than the cost of the cash module and attendant, it will be adopted.

I suspect that most new college grads have never used cash to buy gas (myself included).

Automated fuel stations are always the cheapest. The only reason to go to a manned station is for the shop or cafeteria and you're paying 5-10 cents more per litre for the privilege.

Or if you buy a ticket for cash at a train station from a vending machine, it gives you back change usually in dollar coins.

Or you could even buy a pre-paid RFID card with cash that keeps your balance on it. Many cities have vending machines that dispense these for bus fairs. There are numerous ways to do this, it's a solved problem many times over.

> "Wait, have you never paid cash at a gas station before?"

That seems to actually be a distinct possibility. Some people seem to use cash so infrequently they forget it even exists.

To be fair, paying with cash at a gas station is annoying if your objective is to fill your tank completely rather than spend X amount as it forces you to guess your prospective spend.

That depend on where you are. This started about how it is in Europe, where it is common to first fill your tank, then go inside to pay if you want to pay with cash

These stations can be unmanned.

what happens if I put in $5 and my car only uses $3 of electricity? Automated change has been a thing for ages, see: vending machines, public phones. Or if someone pulls out the charge cable after my car's only taken $1 of electricity? Mind your property.

> With cash, what happens if I put in $5 and my car only uses $3 of electricity? Or if someone pulls out the charge cable after my car's only taken $1 of electricity?

What happens is the same as when filling a car with gas.

Which is the attendant or cashier gives me change.

I haven’t seen a human attendant near any charge point stations.

Do the charger standards pass any data?

Like could you plug in, the car identifies itself as whatever VIN (add whatever anti-tampering challenge-response you want to armchair-design), and the electrons just start flowing?

That's how the Tesla chargers work.

It also looks like CHAdeMO has a 'Plug and Charge' protocol defined:

https://www.chademo.com/chademo-releases-the-latest-version-...

But that's pretty new, and not the SAE standard used in the US. So, it'll be a while...

I know ChargePoint stations in the US accept standard tap-and-pay, so are compatible with Google/Apple Pay.

> Even better would be if the car had secure handshake so once you’ve registered once for a network, you can just plug in and be done.

I'm really surprised this isn't how it works... Surely if they can figure out autopilot they can make charging seamless. Wait... never mind.

This is how the Tesla superchargers work - authorization and billing is all in-car and takes place automatically, so all you do is plug in and it immediately begins charging.

For other charging networks, however, it seems to be needlessly more complicated.

Even the us is super cumbersome.

I just present my RFID Chargepoint card, and it pretty much just works.

That is how Tesla's superchargers work.

It's quite sad that this comment (which is currently at the top) is full of misinformation.

Yes, you need an RFID card (or keychain hanger), because these are low-margin transactions; transaction fees would make charging more expensive, and the fees to maintain card readers would mean that there would be much fewer charging points as they would be more expensive to install.

No, you don't need an app. Some charge points allow you to use an app instead of a card, if you prefer that. But that's by no means required, you can always use a card instead.

No, you don't need 5 cards. One card (plus a backup one in case of an outage) should be plenty, the exception being if you're going abroad (this depends on the roaming agreements your card provider has). Now, some cards offer cheap rates at some charge points, so by having multiple cards it's possible to save some money. But that's by no means required.

Transaction fees for European PIN transactions aren't that crippling, and the convenience of being able to actually recharge is easily worth a couple of cents. These required signups are just needless fragmentation of an already small market.

What I don't get is why every gas station does not also have at least one charging point. They've got air for your tires, sometimes a car wash, and tons of other conveniences, but no electricity? Electricity should be the easiest thing in the world.

The whole point is of course that eventually you can recharge wherever you park, but that means there must be more places to recharge than there are gas stations, not less. This situation is ridiculous.

To be fair electric cars are still very much in their infancy. We are talking about 2-3% of all cars on the road.

I know Shell is actually starting to add electricity to their inventory in gas stations. But in urban Europe space is at a premium and the investments are huge.

Electric charging isn't a low margin operation. Sale prices for electricity via them routinely see a 200% margin compared to wholesale electricity prices.

The title here is "around Europe", which guarantees "abroad".

European's charging network infrastructure is probably more fragmented whereas in the U.S. there is only a few dominant ones: ChargePoint, EVgo and Tesla. Both can have iOS Passbook / Wallet integration so that you don't need a physical RFID card but rather a digital pass, pair with a NFC-capable phone, physical ID cards are eliminated.

There are a lot of reason the charging infrastructure market is fragmented, mostly due to it's the early days of EV-lution where market consolidation hasn't fully played out yet. Also building charging stations is a capital-heavy business since it involves the land lease/purchase as well as construction/equipments (DC fast charging stations are very expensive, the higher the power the more expensive)/installation (permits etc)/maintenance. A friend of mine spent his own money to install a ChargePoint 50kw DCFC at his restaurant, it ended up costing an upward of $50k - at $2/kwh charging rate, he would barely break even in 3 years.

>>he would barely break even in 3 years

from the profit at the charger, agreed. However, it's safe to presume this charger was installed in order to attract more wealthy customers -- ones who likely bring higher food & beverage profit margins than the average Corolla diver.

Yes and no. My friend told me that it didn't bring substantial business as he would have hoped for. But again, as a fellow EV enthusiast, installing a DCFC at his restaurant was his contribution to promote EV adoption rather than generating more revenue (nice to have). Obviously it would be a different story for different cases.

If he was charging a 10x markup on electricity, I’m not surprised he didn’t see a substantial uptick...

For most consumers, it isn't easy to find out the price of EV charging before arriving at the charger.

And by the time you've arrived, you probably are going to stay anyway, at least for a bit, because there probably aren't many other chargers available in your remaining range.

The same app/site that I use to find charging stations tells me exactly what they charge for parking time and electricity consumption.

Even if it didn't, most business relies on repeat customers. You can shear a sheep many times, but skin it only once.

I wouldn't be sure about that. Depending on incentives, a Nissan Leaf can be even cheaper than a Toyota Corolla.

Yes - the EV incentive outlook have been changing quickly in Trump administration though. A lot of EV makers are undergoing phase out periods too, Tesla & GM and soon Nissan

I really don't get why it's so impossible to just add a (contactless or normal) card payment terminal to the stations. The standard gas stations will have those, always.

It's cost concerns, I suspect. Gas pump credit frauds are also a concern.

Because the first thing you do after fraudulently using a credit card is waiting around at the scene of the crime for an hour while your car charges

Because capital investment funded companies have very different goals than a traditional business.

A traditional business has cash flow as it's number one priority.

A young capital investment based company has market share and growth as it's top priority.

It's just a product of the priorities of how most modern businesses are created.

They'd grow faster if the charging stations were easier to use and didn't require signing up days I'm advance just to charge your car.

The company that fixes this poor experience and offers a simple credit/debit card payment option, like a standard gas pump, is going to win.

Didn’t ChargePoint already win, at least in the US?

It's still hilarious to me that the great investors and moneymen of the world have all gotten together and decided that "step 1 collect users, step 3 profit" is the best business model.

This is probably so that credit card fees can be avoided. An app can offer alternative ways to pay that don't incur a fee for the merchant. Also it's a new industry, so they likely want to collect data on where people with electric cars live so they know where the best location to build a charging station is.

Yes, I'm sure it's that and not additional revenue from selling the data to advertisers or insurance companies.

Every gas station accepts normal debit and credit cards.

On the other hand, skimmers and stolen cards are rampant at gas pumps. I'd be leery of deploying an unmanned roadside credit card reader. Maybe the extra vetting is an anti-fraud measure.

This just isn't a thing in Europe.

Card skimmers most definitely exist. Many ATMs have a warning sign to check if the card slot has been tampered with. And the use of chips instead of the magnetic strips they used in the past makes cards impossible to copy.

It's not a crippling problem, but that's largely because of such measures.

I'm not sure where you live, but it absolutely is a thing in my part of Europe (the UK).

What about all the vending machines that take credit cards?

All vending machines taking cards in Europe are NFC rather than magstripe, so aren't vulnerable to cloned cards.

Not true. Most I know use chipped cards. Magstripe is indeed dead because it's woefully outdated and insecure, but there's more than NFC.

Because of cost?

1. Cost per charge << per tank, and

2. cost credit car reader >> rfid reader.

I would think that if you are setting up a charging station, buying half a dozen of commercial credit card readers would be cheaper than developing/testing/maintaining a specific payment app.

It's cheaper to develop the app that authorizes you to charge and deducts from a balance ($10, for example) than the credit card transaction fees that are unsustainable at charges between $0.50 and $10. This is no different than how tollways charge your credit card on file to replenish a balance, and then deduct from that balance (or even how Twilio does billing).

TLDR Credit card fees are expensive, especially when your margins are thin and you are not yet at scale where you have pricing power to pressure processors to lower your CC fees.

For road trippers, maybe an extra $1 convenience charge for using a CC, while signing up for the app waives that charge would work.

For those on a once in a while trip, they can eat the several dollars in convenience fees, while those that travel regularly can get their app of choice.

It's also not fun to leave some dollars hostage on some app as a credit when you may use them months or years later.

These are great shims until billing is part of the vehicle-charger negotiation prior to charging starting.

Credit card readers are dirt cheap.

You should pay for a reliable model, but the same applies to RFID. Still not very much.

At least in the UK, until quite recently most networks were subscription clubs rather than pay as you go. There was no incremental charge for filing up, just a £10/year membership charge.

Now EVs have become more popular, the charging model is changing to a more sustainable system. The government is also working to enforce roaming between networks.

credit/debit transactions are too expensive for these small transactions to be viable. many stores have a „no cards below 10€“ policy because of this.

€10?! That is excessive. In the past, there have been shops that asked not to use a debit card for small transactions, but these days many shops welcome them, because handling cash is also expensive. (My favourite cheese shop is the lone exception: they only accept cash and nothing else. Luddites, but great and cheap cheese.)

Credit cards are extremely rare in Europe, and only few places accept them at all, unless they're compatible with standard bank card transactions. Bank card transactions aren't that expensive and used for absolutely everything, including very small transactions.

For recharging your car, there's really no problem at all to rely on standard bank cards.

Not in Europe where card fees are capped

http://www.eurolabour.org.uk/caps-on-credit-and-debit-card-f...

there are neither references nor a timestamp on that article.

at least in germany, where OP was trying to charge along the route, there is a minimum transaction fee charged by most payment providers.

You are still allowed to ask a reasonable minimum fee, depending on the payment method. Is 10 EUR reasonable for refuel? (instead of refilling 2€ only)

However price must be the same for all payment methods.

If there is an administrative fee it also must be the same across payment methods, excluding business cards and Amex/Diners.

https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/pri...

Is this really true? Around here (Oakland, California) the parking meters take credit cards. Today for example, I paid $0.50 US for parking using a Visa card.

the first offer I found for the first offer i found for german CC terminals (sumup.de): - 2.75% on credit card tx - .95% on EC tc (popular form of debit cards) - no base fee

I only found secondary sources for the direct way, but they state (zahlungsverkehrsfrafen.de) - .3%, at least .08€ for EC tx - 2-4% for CC tx, depending on provider

Wifi has been like that for like 15+ years and it seems way harder to sign up to one of those. It effectively means I'll never use it.

If someone made a WiFi protocol which allowed me to "autoconnect and use WiFi whenever the price per GB was under $2", I'd make a lot of use of it.

As it is, connecting to "free WiFi" just isn't worth the hassle of clicking through T&C pages, and paid WiFi is even worse.

It's bugged me that this whole song and dance of wifi portals; unencrypted wifi, dns spoofing, and sign in pages have been around for over a decade and none of the wifi revisions formalized this. It's been a kludgey cat-and-mouse where the OS checks captive.apple.com and gives you a modal pop up, some wifi networks let you send iMessages and gmail, but wont let you browse without paying. In then end you're still using unencrypted wifi.

I've heard there is finally some future wifi spec formalizing open portals that negotiate to an encrypted connection.

https://xkcd.com/1865/

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