From what I can tell, people press it instead of dealing with the touch screen.
90% of the problems I've had come down to payment processing issues. They all thought they should bundle a crappy social network with the ability to pay for charging, and installed buggy / broken card readers.
Ford made it pretty clear they're supporting NACS because they sent people to chargers to see if they could charge or not, and the failure rate was way above the networks' reported broken charger rate.
I don't think the switch to the supercharger network has anything to do with the charging technology.
Having said that, can you pay to charge a tesla with a credit card? Does it actually work reliably? If the other networks are any indicator, that's the hardest technical challenge in this space.
Gov't finally got their act together and have now mandated that all new chargers must accept a standard payment card withou any fuzz.
Hopefully they'll make that rule universal in a not too distant future.
And they're only requiring to accept card. The chargers could still offer charging via app or sms like now.
Norway leads the way yet again!
I don't need an account to go pump gas from whatever gas station nearby. I shouldn't need an account to get a charge from a Tesla charger, and it shouldn't be able to just deny service to my car because the CEO of Tesla doesn't want to play ball with some other manufacturer at the moment.
Exxon or Shell shouldn't be able to just refuse to pump gas into a Hyundai.
I don't think it's a technical challenge. I just don't think any of the charging networks are content to only sell the electricity - they do everything they can to get users to download an app so they can aggregate and sell user data as another source of income.
From a user point-of-view, of course EV chargers that could work just like a gas pay-at-the-pump system would be preferable, but that hasn't been mandated, so that hasn't happened.
The credit card fees are also relatively high for small transactions (it's usually just about $1.20 for me to top up my PHEV battery at the chargers near my work). So the apps prefer to get you to "load" 10 or 20 bucks into the app at a time, and then debit your app account for each charge.
Next, electrically different cars also have different battery pack voltages. An Ioniq 5 has a much higher voltage than an ID.4. There's limited room for cars to change DC voltage so non-Tesla chargers tend to need to support a wider range of voltages.
Then there's the fact that the CCS connector is bulkier than the Tesla ones so people use more force, and are more likely to drop them if they have limited dexterity. This also accelerates reliability problems.
9 times out of 10 there are more stalls out of service than in use. And it's always the same ones, because they aren't getting fixed. And it's not just old hardware, because this includes stations that only went live in the last 6-9 months.
If US makers ever sold enough CCS cars, it would have been a huge problem. We are moving over to NACS instead..
If VW wanted to slow EV adoption in the US market, there's not much they would have done differently in their management of EA.
Can't wait to get my car on NACS and never have to think of EA again.
Lost opportunity.