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Comment by aidenn0 | Hacker News Reader

The payment thing just boggles my mind. I've been paying at card readers at a gas pump for 20 years now and exactly once did it not work. It's the one thing that has been completely solved in industry, and it doesn't work with EVs.

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FWIW, I think the card industry itself is having to rethink a lot of stuff for EVs.

Petrol pumps with card readers are their own little universe of rules and compliance standards within the credit card industry (the formal term is 'Automated Fuel Dispenser'). It's far enough afield that you're looking at specialized software and vendors, in part because a lot of them support fleet cards, which range from "95% normal Visa/Mastercard, but restricted to a specific merchant category" to "completely different network with its own messaging model".

There's been a lot of new spec documents floating around to accomodate differences due to the EV fueling concepts. I suspect the ways we described petrol-- gallons and grades-- don't perfectly map to electricity, and fleet card customers are looking for similar trackability.

Also the average gas payment is about 10x larger than what charging an EV costs around here. So the amount of money "lost" on credit card fees and whatever the actual physical device costs to operate is relatively a lot bigger.

VS an app, where you keep almost 100% of the money AND can track your users better.

Just set a minimum limit on the charge amount for the fee overhead to be acceptble. Why an app? Just pay with a card or NFC. If I have to install an app it's a no go. Funds "lost" in multiple apps, unable to be redeemed, tracking etc.

For me (coming up on 9 years of LEAF ownership), the app is something that helps me find the station in the first place and is something that’s more likely to be with me and easily found than a rarely used card or fob.

I had a Chargepoint key fob for a while, which was also always with the car, but it eventually broke and a replacement was chargeable to me, so I chose not to buy it, as I already had the app.

The app isn’t required, but I prefer it.

I use RFID/NFC tags 99% of the time, but I still need the app if I want real-time information whether a charger is online and available anyway.

There are services that try to combine all that data into a single application (or even the car's infotainment), but every one of those sucks to a different degree.

ZipCar has an elaborate fleet card setup. I remember having to type in the current odometer value, and some other identifiers, on the gas pump keypad. Never seen something like that before.

I worked as a delivery driver for an auto parts store in ~2010. We had the same thing, but the card was tied to the vehicle (the card was literally attached to the vehicle's key) so we didn't have to type in the vehicle ID.

I've run into more failures than that at gas pumps, but it is mostly rare like you say. However in almost all cases, they're on the same network as the gas station POS, and I assume hard-wired. The card readers I see at EV spots seem to less durable, similar to the card readers you see on vending machines. I bet they mostly are using cellular to communicate.

That probably comes down to how the infrastructure is built out. A lot of companies are selling EV systems that can be installed in a pre-existing parking lot. A gas station requires installing large underground tanks, so it's not much extra effort to throw the data wires. In order to convince someone a business to install an EV charger, every little bit of effort counts.

Almost no other vending process dependent on Paywave breaks longterm. I think its because the refill cycle is frequent enough there's a functional minimum attendance and people with "power" (the agents) who profit from the service are made aware of the bug.

with EV chargers there's no nexus of incentive to the site operator to be aware this is bust unless they actively engage. Maybe, "your rent is conditional on reporting problems" would motivate?

It is solved by Tesla... You just drive up to a supercharger and plug in. No apps nothing.

You have your car registered with Tesla one way or the other to accomplish that. I’m totally willing to do that for bpm CCS EV, but I guess this will just be a convenience for NACS.

NACS is actually just CCS over the Tesla physical form. Hopefully Tesla is mandating and certifying a specific subset of CCS for their Supercharger rollout of NACS.

I think there's a common lesson to CCS1/CCS2/CHAdeMO and HTTP 1.1: Any standards that avoids discussion of payment integration eventually succumbs to monopolistic substitutes.

There is an app, its just that the car is running it instead of your phone.

So your car is already registered with your payment, which is what people are disagreeing with. The problem isn't the "app", it's the fact that you need to register with an additional payment processor rather than just tapping your card like everywhere else

Some people won't want to use an app, but the bigger problem is each charging company requires its own app. I don't think most people will mind setting an app once. They sure will mind setting an app every time they go to a charger and manage 10 accounts.

I try tap-to-pay at every gas pump that has the hardware, but only at 1 in 5 or so does it actually work.

Come up to Canada, I've never experienced one NOT to work, and I've also never seen a pump in the last ~5 years that doesn't have tap to pay.

Another Canadian here. I've seen plenty of stations that don't have tap to pay. A few that don't have pay at the pump enabled and require you to go into the store. I refueled at a few this summer that couldn't automatically refund unused prepaid balance; you had to go back to the store for the partial refund.

Not hard to find them, but you're not going to stumble on one if you never leave the city or deviate from the major highways.

Oh, that's often true for me too for tap-to-pay, even at a typical indoor POS. Inserting the card always works though.

That's actually because most cards (or merchants, perhaps) have a limit for tap to pay that is different to chip transactions ($100-300), and if the gas station does a pre-auth for $125 or so (which is what a lot of Safeway gas stations due) it hits that and requests card insertion.

Not to excuse it but most gas pumps I've been too are in covered areas where as EV chargers are not normally.

Card readers surely should be weather resistant but EV chargers could use more cover.

I think that they are so close to broken to start with, they can’t get worse.

The UI for vouchers, the stupid locations of the buttons and the advertising. It was this crap that had me get an EV.

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