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Comment by turtlebits | Hacker News Reader

Mass adoption won't happen until charging infrastructure improves dramatically.

As a non-Tesla owner, I have had the worst experiences at fast charging stations - I'd say 70% of the time at Electrify America stations (they have the most fast charging coverage), I run into a charger that doesn't work and waste time moving my car and retrying another bay. (I've even experienced a station with 5 bays where none of them would charge - yet they all showed available).

I don't even bother with L2 stations as I'm never in a place long enough to get any meaningful charge out of one - and I'm not going to go out of my way to a location that has one.

With all that said, taking a long trip is out of the question for me.

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I've driven through Germany last summer, tried 3 different charging stations, none of them worked. Or rather, they did, but I couldn't set up the app for them, one because it didn't have an English option, one because it wouldn't accept my non-German card and another because it was giving me an extremely helpful "unspecified" error. But even here in UK it's a mess. There is a charging station near my home that seems to be out of order 90% the time. There is another one where I can't set up an account and their customer support is non existent. Funnily enough the best experiences I ever had with charging stations in the UK were always at Shell charging stations - plug in, tap your payment card on the side, done. No apps, no stupid fobs or anything, it's easier than paying for petrol. I really do think that legislation should come in to force all providers to accept card payment at the charger, even if the cost is higher(offer discount to account holders, but at least let me pay even without an account)

Charging in much of Europe is really not a great experience. It's a fragmented market, different electricity providers (this matters, some chargers really want you to be a customer of a specific electricity provider, some just offer different prices depending on this), different charging networks, different plugs, different apps and payment methods, different behavior even if you're seemingly in the same network, wildly different prices, etc.

Every app shows different chargers and different status on whether they're occupied or not. Most are broken anyway. Some are on hotel or supermarket grounds so they're accessible only to some people, and even in the same network might have a different price because the owner of the land asks for a cut (yes, that's a thing). Some are inside a parking lot so you pay the parking on top of the charging. Some are on a free parking spot for EVs so someone will park there all day. Some charge per KWh, per minute, or a combination, plus maybe another one time fee.

Chargers need to be as ubiquitous as gas stations, and provide an experience that's just as frictionless. Drive in, pick a plug and start fast charging, get a maximum allotted time to charge, then pay like you'd do in any store, or better yet have the car talk to the charger and handle this for you (ISO 15118) and be on your way. Alternatively, to take advantage of how different electricity is from gas and maybe also use those cars as electricity storage, governments could invest to put charging points on every street parking, in every streetlight, etc.

This sounds like an opportunity for an independent app unifying all of those and gathering/displaying real usability data. I don't think it could make official app stores due to having to reverse-engineer payment APIs of others, but... maybe something open-source and side-loaded?

This exists, it's called plugsurfing [1]. They do charge a 10% surplus though.

[1] https://www.plugsurfing.com/home

Ugh, card payments in Germany, for non-Germans, is generally a nightmare anyway. It's a bummer that it's not a solved problem for EV charging, because in many ways, I think the EU is ahead of the US in (non-Tesla) charging infra.

What's the problem with card payments in germany for non-germans?

Credit cards are not widely accepted in Germany. Germans generally use cash or EC/Maesto debit cards, and you can't get an EC card if you're not an EU resident with an EU bank account (which can be hard for Americans, and, to a lesser extent, any foreigner, I'm sure).

I used to have a Maestro-branded debit card (in the US) when I was younger. I have no idea if it's the same system and/or if they're compatible. I checked my wallet and my current debit card has no Maestro branding.

I've more than once found myself halfway through a meal before realizing that I might not have a way to pay for it.

https://www.german-way.com/germanys-cash-culture-geld-stinkt...

We need the Google Fi equivalent of credit cards. Even with vaunted "international credit cards", there are still use cases where they do not work, which seem country-specific, and finding information about what is actually going on under the hood has been difficult for this layperson.

With the caveat that I've only travelled in the Western world, credit cards really are almost universally accepted, Germany aside. Obviously, the smaller the merchant, and the smaller the country/town, the less likely.

As an American, a particularly odd experience was at a shop in Peru, where they only accepted MasterCard and not Visa. These days we're so used to them being interchangeable, it had never even crossed my mind. Between my wife and I, we had 5 or 6 Visa debit/credit cards, and 0 MasterCard.

Exceptions abound in Asia, though there are far fewer exceptions in the West.

For example in Taiwan, in their online grocery ecosystem all the market participants use the same kind of SMS verification step that is intercepted at the card network stage (the issuing bank doesn't see this activity). So Visa and MasterCard both generate the challenge, but US card holders do not see this, and US customer support does not know what to do on the back end to support it.

I know somewhere, there is some kind of setting that interfaces with for example, Visa International, but only a credit card industry domain expert with the lingo would know the right words. I suspect I need a Chip and PIN EMV card issued, and it drops to SMS for certain online transaction types, but that's just a WAG at this time.

I've run into similar exceptions elsewhere in transactions that require some kind of national ID number tied to a delivery address for higher-value orders.

The types of risk profiles associated with many new use cases is fracturing credit card handling, but the use cases international travelers encounter is so small it isn't worth addressing just for that demographic. However, as the Net continues to bleed international transactions across borders (AliBaba is just the beginning), I think this will be a very lucrative market for the first-mover to do the Uber-like Herculean work of addressing every jurisdiction's concerns to put them all under a next-generation credit card.

I've been paying with my phone using Google Pay connected to PayPal for the past year. It works basically everywhere, except for places that only take cash.

The problem I had specifically was that the app expected a German billing address to add a card, which obviously I couldn't provide.

MasterCard owns Maestro, so would MasterCards work there?

No, they don't.

"But even here in UK it's a mess."

I cannot parse that.

Try adding the word "the" in every spot, and report back when you find the right one. Hint: sentence.split()[3:4]

Sorry, not a native English speaker, but let me know what I can do to help.

He he.

You missed the joke, expected.

"Even" in the UK? The UK is a basket case right now. HAs been since the GFC, and was shaky from about 1947.

I remember in Thanksgiving 2019 that Tesla owners were sometimes waiting in line for hours at Supercharger stations in California -- and California has a lot of those! Even Tesla doesn't have it figured out during peak travel times.

You can't build for peak traffic, not in software nor in hardware.

Gas stations seem to be able to handle it. Why can't we expect the same for charging stations? Build for peak capacity. The chargers don't draw much when they aren't plugged in to cars. If we expect to succeed with charging infrastructure we need to make it convenient, even during holidays.

Building a gas station for peak capacity would mean building so many pumps that you never have to queue. Even when people leave their car by the pump while going to the bathroom or grab a slushie and some snacks.

That is a solved problem in most of the world. I have waited at a gas station at most 5 times in my life and never more than 2-4 minutes. Going to the bathroom or leaving the pump I have never seen anyone do. If I did I would turn off the pump at the big red STOP button as leaving the pump running unattended is illegal.

You can't leave the pump running outside of the US, the fuel nizzle won't lock.

I mean the people who fill up their car, and just leave the car at the pump.

> You can't leave the pump running outside of the US, the fuel nizzle won't lock.

There might be places where locking nozzles are indeed uncommon, but I don't think you can generalise this to "outside of the US". I'm living outside of the US, but gas stations still commonly have locking nozzles.

That must suck in the middle of winter if you have to stand there holding subzero temperature metal while filling your 20-gallon tank and when it's done, go clean off your windshield, hatchback glass, etc.

Hell, around here, when the temperature drops well below 0F, lots of people keep their car running and just sit in it while the tank fills.

Yea, I live in Finland, cold isn't an issue :)

And like every ICE fan likes to repeat, it's like 2-3 minutes to fill up a tank in a European car. And 2 minutes of that is fiddling with the chip&pin card reader in the cold.

Even if it's negative Freedom Units outside, the car won't cool down enough to get cold during refueling - keeping it running is just plain stupid.

I think he's saying leaving the pump after getting your gas. That's very common in my area. You pump your gas, go into the shop to get something and you leave your car at the pump. Nobody leaves their car while pumping.

It's not uncommon to have to wait a few minutes for a pump to open up in my local gas station and it's got about 15 pumps.

Where do you live? Everywhere in the US I've been the normal use case if you're getting something other than gas is to start the pump and then walk into the store to get food/use bathroom/etc., while the tank is filling. Yes, it's illegal, but people do it all-the-time.

Contrast Tesla superchargers in CA with, e.g. getting gas at a Costco. They experience similar degrees of queuing. There is a limit to how much of peak capacity you can build for. The solution is not to increase the capacity of a single station, but to build more of them (just as with gas stations). Which is obviously what Tesla is doing.

This is a great mystery of electric vehicle charging: why is it so hard for anyone but Tesla to keep most of the chargers working most of the time?

It's not really a mystery if you understand who the customers are. Tesla's Supercharger customers are Tesla owners (for the most part), and Tesla has a vested interest in keeping them happy.

Other charging stations are mostly installed in mall parking lots and so on by government mandate. The owners of the parking lots pay to get them installed and maintained--they are the customers. And since they're (mostly) satisfying a government tick box, there's not nearly as much incentive to keep functioning.

Multiple vendors in one system.

You've got the provider for the actual charger (a handful of different providers), which needs to negotiate with the car via CCS. This can fail in umpteen different ways, as car manufacturers differ on how they implement CCS (Dunno how, but it happens).

Then you've got the software in the charging point, which needs to be customised for the brand you're selling under (another moving part).

And lastly, you have the back end system for the brand, which handles authentication, authorization (RFID or App) and billing - this is the bit that ultimately gives the charger the go-ahead to start feeding power to the connected car.

Any of these fails, no electricity for you.

For 22kW "slow" chargers this is a bit simpler as the actual charger is a lot less complex, it doesn't need to negotiate, it just needs to switch one relay.

Tesla is like Apple in this case, they take care of the whole stack. So as long as the charger has power, it'll work. Authentication and authorization are done by having the car negotiate with the charger directly via the charging cable, no dongles or apps needed.

> For 22kW "slow" chargers this is a bit simpler as the actual charger is a lot less complex, it doesn't need to negotiate, it just needs to switch one relay.

To be more explicit, the actual AC "slow" charger is built into the car, so it's guaranteed to work (and indeed, it just needs to signal a contactor to close the circuit).

Yea, as far as the battery is concerned, there is no "AC" charging. It's always DC.

The current is either provided by the built-in charger (AC-DC) or a HVDC charging point.

Opposite experience in 2020 here at EA: sure, I've seen stalls that don't work a few times but it seems to be well correlated with their app showing you they don't work, and most of the time it just works

That is in California, did around ~40-50 charging sessions.

Tesla has said they are willing to license the Supercharger network. That said, superchargers are not immune to being broken either. I find that many if not most have at least one broken stall.

I got free supercharging for ordering an early Model 3 and didn't expect to use it, but it has been a lifesaver during covid when I suddenly lost access to work charging.

As a petrolhead who has never even seen a Supercharger station: what exactly is broken? What is there to break? Physical damage to the cable / connector?

Many things can break: the internet connection, the internal computer, the main power wire to the car connector, something inside the connector, something with the charger circuity like a bad contactor.

Then there's the obvious stuff like physical damage from vandalization or someone driving into it.

WHat a story for the twenty-first century!

It is energy transfer: "Many things can break: the internet connection..." what does the Internet connevction have to do with it?

(To be clear, that is a rhetorical question. I know why and how those systems are fundamentally broken - almost by design!)

Having never used or even seen a super charger, I have no idea why one would need a friggen internet connection. Don’t you just plug them in and swipe your card like a gas station?

You don't think gas stations have an internet connection?

I don’t think they require one to function. Gas stations, including ones where you pay at the pump, functioned fine without Internet before the Internet.

I don't recall any pay at the pump gas stations pre internet.

How exactly does a pay-at-the-pump gas station function without internet?

You go inside and pay cash to the clerk who authorizes $20 of gas on pump #5.

I'm in Oregon where we (mostly) legally can't pump our own gas. There may be pumps that are like vending machines: they take cards or cash.

There are exceptions, like if you're in the rural areas (counties under 40,000 residents). They also changed it for a while during the early part of COVID.

I notice that the pumps still run the commercials on the pumps here. Probably cheaper to just build one model of pump even though Oregon and New Jersey but it would drive me crazy if I was pumping gas for a living.

> How exactly does a pay-at-the-pump gas station function without internet?

I realize that there are gas stations where you can't pay at the pump, but that's not the claim I was responding to in the PC.

Regardless, if you are using your credit card to pay for your gas (which I am certain you can do in Oregon gas stations), the gas station is utilizing internet in order to give you gas.

Okay, then replace “internet” with “dial-up private network”.

They used to require a phone line. Now they don't, because an internet connection replaced it, with similar reliability.

Before internet they had a satellite connection, or a dedicated phone line.

To be able to swipe your card you also need internet connection. Very rare, but I did have experience at a gas station when I couldn't fill up, because the internet connection was down.

You just plug in, no card. The car identifies itself. It needs an internet connection to report the usage so it can be charged to the correct account. Gas stations obviously need a network connection of some kind too for card swipes to work. Otherwise you'd have to fall back to cash or manually writing down card numbers (is that even allowed anymore?) Almost all Superchargers are unmanned so no cash.

They could store the transactions in local memory until the connection is restored.

How do you know the account is valid, able to be charged, etc?

There are only half million Teslas so you can just distribute the VIN numbers of all of them with a single bit flag saying whether they are eligible for free charging and another bit saying that they have an account in good order. Twenty bytes per car should do it, say 10 MB of storage to hold enough information to say which cars are allowed to charge even if the network is down.

Mind you in three years of owning and driving (70k km) my Model S I have never encountered a Supercharger station that was entirely out of order, just a few heavily used ones that have one or two stalls often not working.

Send invoices to identifiable users, which go to collections if unpaid.

Eat the cost for unidentifiable users. As long as you can fix any connection problem within a few days, the maximum value lost is limited by physics.

People used to pay for stuff with checks all the time. It's similar to that.

Would they store all of the valid credit card numbers in the world in local memory too? =)

EMV (chip/contactless) credit cards are capable of working without an internet connection, including PIN or device-based verification. Transactions get stored/batched on the payment terminal until the connection is available again.

EV chargers often still require internet, however, as payment is via app or their own RFID card/dongle. Putting credit card readers directly on the chargers is a relatively recent (and not yet universal) improvement.

Another reason for internet is so that chargers can report their availability status. In-car navigation or charging apps can direct you to locations with available chargers, avoiding ones that are fully occupied or out of service.

That may be theoretically possible but I very much doubt any retailers have that set up to work properly. Around here the gas stations still verify your ZIP code. Superchargers could also store transactions in theory but I doubt it actually works there either.

It certainly happens, very occasionally, here in the UK. You try to pay something with contactless but there's a long processing delay. The terminal will then time out and ask you to insert the card and enter PIN, and you will get something strange printed on the receipt like "CVM: offline PIN". You may then see the transaction pop up in your notifications a few hours later, or early the next morning.

Also, some merchants do offline or semi-offline transactions as a matter of course. London Buses, for example, accept contactless payments via bank card. But the transaction must be processed very quickly and the mobile data connection is not entirely reliable - the bus could be in a tunnel or a coverage black spot. So what really happens is the transactions are batched and processed at the end of the day (this also allows them to do some post-processing for multiple-journey discounts, daily price caps, etc).

Someone like London Buses isn't overly concerned about fraud because the transaction values are low. But they do have a way to blacklist cards numbers that are known to be bad.

How do you verify there is enough balance in the account, etc?

Pin+chip just verifies that the card is yours, not that the card can actually pay for anything.

For example, you could use a VISA gift card with $0 balance to pay for things if you had a system that was accepting transactions while offline.

There's no way to verify the balance offline. But, generally speaking, the offline mode is only used if there's a network/connectivity failure, and there's generally no way for a fraudster to know in advance if that's going to happen.

The acquirer (ie: the merchant's bank) accepts liability in the case of fraudulent transactions. There are limits on offline transaction values, and merchants that have high fraud risk may not allow it at all.

What do you think happens when you swipe your card at a gas pump. That authorization is going out over the Internet or a phone line.

I pay cash

The supercharger network is Teslas not-so-secret weapon.

It's frustrating when chargers don't work, I was using them frequently for a while when I was taking a child to and from doctors appointments multiple times a week and encountered a few.

That being said, I never got stranded and there was always a charger I could use. This was in metro Atlanta in 2017, the situation only got better since then.

> a non-Tesla owner

I think you'll be in the minority.

I am never buying a Tesla.

I want to own my car

You do own your car if you buy a Tesla?

Pretty sure this is a reference to the cases where Tesla has revoked different features (SuperCharger access, AutoPilot, extended mileage) from cars.

Sometimes that seems to be because they had the feature enabled by accident or the car was declared as totaled but I haven't been tracking the cases closely enough to be definitive. Not sure that anybody is.

SuperCharger access has nothing to do with "owning your car". Less so but still ditto for AutoPilot, as it is not a piece of hardware but rather software that is constantly being updated and honestly dangerous to deploy/use if Tesla cannot guarantee the integrity of sensors/drive-by-wire mechanisms/etc.

Extended mileage does seem weird though – they've revoked software updates that have extended mileage? That would be shitty if true (if not for a good reason), but I honestly haven't heard about that one. And I'd still argue in favor of this being ownership, as updates are not your right as an owner of the vehicle (and with every other car you've ever owned don't come with the vehicle at all). At the very least you always have whatever features you had when you bought the car from Tesla, which is exactly what you expect from any other car you purchase.

No you do not.

Tesla can change the settings of the car without asking you.

For me to change the settings of "my" Tesla I need their permission, which is not available.

My electric car will not be connected to the Internet, it will have no wireless network access of any sort. None.

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