Why can't Tesla owners plug in their car at home because Tesla's online stuff is broken? Do their cars really need internet access to charge?
Though I would have personally expected Tesla to set up supercharges in a way that would instead provide free charging when the supercharging internet access is down. The monetary loss from that would probably cost far less than this negative PR. And this is literally the first time I hear about their network going down in a way that supercharging is unavailable (maybe it happened before, but I haven't been paying much attention until 2019), so it isn't like they would be losing tons of money by providing that charging for free. And especially since filling up from around 20% to 90% at a supercharger typically costs me way less (somewhere between $16-26 total) than it would for a gas car.
Yeah, that's definitely a valid concern. I wonder how easy it would be to do so, given I haven't heard of it happening with superchargers before. But again, there was no incentive to do so without free charging, so who knows.
If you're trying to imply that considering these threat models is a reason not to come up with a proper fail-safe system, then the very same argument applies to creating these charging stations and letting people use them in the first place.
Keep in mind that a lot of supercharger stations are contained within much larger parking lots/garages. More specifically, they are simply just random stretches of parking spots in a garage, but with supercharger stalls installed.
As a real example, 3 closest supercharging stations to where I live are: a large office building multilevel garage, Trader Joe's multilevel garage, and a giant multilevel garage at a mall. Each one can fit bajillion cars (maybe not the trader joe's one, as it only has 2 or 3 floors, with about 25 parking spots on each).
If one of those cars is involved in its third DoS happening in the last quarter, you may be able to alert the authorities while it's still charging.
You can fail safe with your failsafes. You can react differently based on different kinds of failures. You can put limits to how generous you want your failsafe system to be. You can have an independent killswitch for your failsafe mechanism. You just need to put some effort into designing your system's failure modes.
You may also find out that DoSing the charging station in order to use it for free simply doesn't happen in the wild and that you can safely afford to only react once you notice it actually happening. That's why you pay all these security engineers that are able to reasonably assess these risks, you know.
You can do the same in Europe with EVs. Europe standardised on CCS Type 2 Combo for EV charging so you're not locked into one charging network. All brands of DC fast charger can charge all brands of EV, exactly as it should be.
Some chargers are working fine. Ionity, BP (ironic)
Some will not initiate charging because registration email/login/payment in their app does not work. (Freshmile in France, some Swedish one in Greece whose name I forget did not sent an activation email)
Some chargers just straight out doesn't like your car, because reasons. "Find another charger" you will be told. (Fortiza)
Some chargers are just broken, but you can't tell until you arrive. (Another Freshmile in France)
Yes, there are better and worse ones. Spend your money at the better ones.
> BP (ironic)
Why is BP ironic? They're in the energy business. So is Shell.
Of course there were lots of cases of fraud linked to those too.