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Comment by trollied | Hacker News Reader

Great news. Though the EV charging ecosystem is still a huge mess. Each country has 5 or 6 different networks that all require different apps, charge wildly different prices etc. A huge mess. Hopefully things will settle as adoption increases.

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If you're in Europe, there are a few major EMSPs that provide you access to multiple networks. The two biggest players seem to be New Motion owned by Shell and PlugSurfing owned by Fortum. In most major countries these two have a massive percentage of the chargers and networks. In some they have 100%.

The pricing is down to the CPOs and the same charger can cost different prices based on what deal they made with the EMSP.

Source: I work for a EMSP.

Thanks for the insight! Though the fact that understanding this requires me to learn two new acronyms might hint at the problem with customer adoption and perception.

I don't think we use those terms in public. We use charging network provider or something for EMSP and operator for CPO (Charging Point Operators). I'm also used to lots of very techincal dicussions on this subject where everyone understands them. Every now and then someone adds in a new term to mean one of the normal terms because of some new thing.

When you onboard to our company you have to learn so many acronyms.

Open charge point protocol (OCPP) is used by all EVs and EV chargers currently for charger management, and they are working on an enhancement that will allow your car to directly exchange payment info with the charger via the charging hardware - no more app needed. It’ll take a few years to take hold but I’m very hopeful this works out, it will make the whole thing so much easier.

An app shouldn’t be required. A single text message should be sufficient for payment, like M-Pesa in Kenya, or even just paying with cash like on street meters.

Some neat apps like Carge are tackling this: https://carge.co

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