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Comment by blackaspen | Hacker News Reader

I still hate that I can't just use a credit card + pre-auth (or even cash!) at an EV charging station like I can at every single gas station. The data! It's! Important! To! Investors!

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Cash wouldn't work as most charging stations would be constantly broken due to attempts to rob them. It's why even parking meters no longer take cash.

In Amsterdam a lot of the officials that collected the coins actually took a lot for themselves even. All those little coins add up to a lot.

But it should NOT be necessary to give up your privacy. Privacy is a human right.

> In Amsterdam a lot of the officials that collected the coins actually took a lot for themselves even.

Considering the fact that the machine counts the coins it receives, and a value of coins gets deposited in a bank, this seems like the easiest fraud in the world to catch.

If that went on for a long time, that is some horrifically incompetent oversight.

Edit: I'm suddenly realizing this was probably about the pre-digital coin-operated parking meters. Which makes me wonder how could you prevent widespread skimming? Unless they had tamper-proof "odometers" inside that you had to record the value of each time you emptied them?

  > Considering the fact that the machine counts the coins it receives

It doesn't. The added hardware for that would be redundant if you could trust the coin collectors. Remember, these were completely mechanical devices.

Yes, they had mechanical odometers in them.

They did but the values were registered by the same people that emptied them.

Eventually it was very hard to find who tampered with the books but eventually they were caught, which is how we know about it.

> Cash wouldn't work as most charging stations would be constantly broken due to attempts to rob them. It's why even parking meters no longer take cash.

Most gas stations in the US take cash without having to fend off constant robbery attempts. I don't see why EV charging stations could not do the same.

Because most EV charging stations are unattended. It brings the barrier down from armed robbery to vandalism and theft.

Putting cash in a pole in the street is really going to casuse a problem at the amounts that EV charging requires.

Ideally we’d follow in Norways’s footsteps and mandate that new charging stations accept credit cards but that’s probably a lost hope with electric cars being a culture war issue in the US these days.

Americans prefer to just take whatever crap corporations give them, and our public chargers definitely are crap.

Well, you see, imposing any limitations on the god-given rights of corporations gives the invisible hand arthritis.

How is it a culture war? I thought that was pretty much over since the cybertruck convinced even hardline republican gas guzzler owners to buy one :P

Elon is very intolerant but at least he is popular with the traditionally hardline climate change denier crowd. I'm really hoping that will make for bipartisan climate action support in the end.

Hasn't happened just yet, they still need more time to think up their excuses as to why they finally caved and bought the clearly superior technology ;)

while the electric truck exists, it is in short supply and so you can't really get it. So they hake time.

This article seems to suggest there still is hold out amongst hardline republicans. Though it also suggests it could be gas costs related...

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/republican-strongholds-are-barel...

True enough, the biggest Trump supporter I know bought a Tesla a few years back. But Trump has pivoted to something like “Democrats and globalists support electric cars so electric cars are bad”: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-wishes-electri...

A Cybertruck with a dedicated combustion engine for rolling coal, now that would be something.

Agreed.

If you want to have some app-based loyalty programs or whatever, the way supermarkets do, that's fine.

But this seems to be a perfect area for consumer regulation.

Not just Norway but also the EU (especially Germany).

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 included $7.5 billion to establish the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program. This program aims to build substantial charging stations every 50 miles along every major travel corridor in the US. The first charging stations funded by it opened earlier this month. NEVI requires that all charging stations built with this funding not require any accounts or apps to initiate a charge, so they will likely all have credit card terminals.

Isn't the vehicle itself the authorization for Tesla?

There's an SAE standard for this, but I _also_ don't want that.

I rented an EV, and had to download an app, use 2fa, and store my credit card, to be able to charge at the hotel I was staying at. This was pretty crummy.

Vehicle-based auth, at least w/ rental cars, sounds like a great way to make lots of money with fees.

You can with some charging stations. Well, that’s assuming the card reader works, which is a much less safe assumption than it is with gas pumps.

In the UK it’s going this way. You can tap your contactless payment card to pre-auth then charge

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