The more likely method might be a premium membership with your Automaker.

I think this would be the hot setup for the consumer. I'd expect the premium to be a bit higher since it would cover all the CPOs in the system and the auto maker and those CPOs would want to share the financial hit, but it would be worth it on a long trip compared to paying for multiple discount plans with multiple CPOs and then not getting to use P&C on the trip after all.

 

My thinking is a bit broader WRT this. Perhaps those networks that offer premium pricing would get a % of revenue automakers collect for premium, based on some historic use patterns. For example, Hyundai would pay 25% of subscription fees collected to Tesla if 25% of Hyundai's customers use Tesla chargers (vs EA, Ionna, etc). In turn, Hyundai would advertise the benefit of their premium membership offering as providing discounted rates on the participating networks. It might even encourage more networks to offer premium pricing.

They could even price it as an annual subscription to reduce churn. In other words, if most people subscribe for 2 months per year under current plans, make the annual subscription cost something close to the annualized cost of two or three months of subscriptions, plus a little for running the game. Bundling it with other Bluelink services might even increase the take rate more, like discounted parking via Hyundai Pay.

I think the point is, getting the service launched in the first place is enough of a task, enhancing it later is an incremental effort.

 

In North America, the parties involve in the NEVI initiative of federally subsidized public chargers got together and came to an agreement on a Top Level Root CA. I don't know who this is, and it doesn't really matter for this discussion anyway. So, there is now a public framework to proceed to a universal system of ISO15118 P&C.

I believe SAE is serving as the Root CA for North America, as announced last December.

 

Right, the important part isn’t who, rather someone is taking on the role.

 

As someone that works in cybersecurity, I'd argue that the who does matter, but it's not something the average user needs to worry about. You want someone with a trusted reputation and a culture of well defined processes and standards. I'd argue that SAE meets these criteria, so there's not much to worry about. I think most people will just treat the process as magic, and not need to know the details. For those that do want to dive in to the details, the root CA provider is worth knowing.

 

this is so far over my head it has to be faa certified

 

Ya, I get it. But there is enough confusion over the topic it seemed worthy of some discussion for those who "get it", or at least parts of it.

 

I meant to include a short discussion of alternatives, the obvious one being Credit Card terminals.

My experience with CC readers at public chargers isn't good. I find a high failure rate, not sure why, perhaps it is a rarely used option so networks pay less attention to it. Or maybe it is the remote locations for many chargers being more difficult to handle CC transactions?

The other part of the Credit Card piece is transaction fees. This amounts to a large % of a total transaction cost as the fees are generally a flat fee, plus a % of the transaction amount. By offloading the collection part to the automakers by adopting P&C, the networks cut their costs considerably.

The way Hyundai is handling this seems to be charging your credit card for each transaction, but they could find consolidating these into daily, or weekly charges to your CC could reduce their costs considerably (fewer flat transaction fees). The cost of delaying processing a CC charge by a day, or week could be offset by a premium billing fee tied to the discounts on networks. So, if you sign up for a premium billing plan, you are billed weekly and get discounts at the participating networks. It could further justify charging a bit more for the service.

 

Interesting writeup, thank you.
Over here in Norway, the ev owners association (Elbil foreningen) have a blue rfid tag members can use, that works on a lot of charging networks across Europe, somewhere above 750000 charging points last i read, so probably gone up a bit more 😁

You set up your chosen payment option in your account with them (credit or debet card) and they are then your roaming operator, and handles billing etc.
They also have premium membership options for ionity.
I keep that tag as a backup in my car. Same as the charge my hyundai card.
I primary use an rfid card that I have linked to about a dozen different providers, including a roaming operator/provider, just to mess stuff up a bit 🤣
Car is also set up with autocharge for a couple of them.

 

Interesting writeup, thank you.
Over here in Norway, the ev owners association (Elbil foreningen) have a blue rfid tag members can use, that works on a lot of charging networks across Europe, somewhere above 750000 charging points last i read, so probably gone up a bit more 😁

You set up your chosen payment option in your account with them (credit or debet card) and they are then your roaming operator, and handles billing etc.
They also have premium membership options for ionity.
I keep that tag as a backup in my car. Same as the charge my hyundai card.
I primary use an rfid card that I have linked to about a dozen different providers, including a roaming operator/provider, just to mess stuff up a bit 🤣
Car is also set up with autocharge for a couple of them.

Right, we have some roaming agreements in the states too. Hyundai provides a $400 ChargePoint credit with new 2025 model purchases, and Chargepoint has roaming agreements with EVgo, EVConnect, Ionna (the US equivalent of Ionity). They also offer RFID cars which work on many if not all of these other networks.

Autocharge, while more convenient than messing with RFID and apps is still tied to individual networks. So, to use Autocharge on EVgo, you have to have an EVgo account, add your car to their billing system (VIN), activate the first time using the app to complete the enrollment, then it works on subsequent sessions on the EVgo network, but no others.

ISO15118 P&C attempts to answer the multiple accounts problem, but it will take years for everyone to get on board. 2025 models are the first to get this capability, thus the article to help people understand what it is all about. Hyundai has been offering ISO15118 P&C in EU, I think with Ionity for some time, so not so new there.

Thanks for adding your regional info, it helps (me at least) to understand a bit about how things work elsewhere.

 

Plug and charge is overrated. With these new chargers it doesn't take that long at all for the car to engage with the charger or the payment process. Plug and charge is a Tesla thing so leave it as a Tesla thing. Everybody's now adapting to the nacs connector and you see how well that's going. The last time I went to DC fast charger I activated the crger with my charge point app. It took about 30 to 40 seconds for it to engage the car and start the payment process. I don't know what I could do differently with 30 or 40 seconds. So that's my thought on plug and charge. Yes it would be a lot more convenient for drivers if everyone had the same app but really it doesn't make a ton of difference. Just remember when you were driving your ice vehicle you still had to activate the pump by going inside or with your credit card. So I don't see why electric vehicles need to be any different.

 

Granted, but the current methods are death by 40 lashes. The problem is, you need apps for nearly every network on long trips to unfamiliar places. Currently, there are 44 networks in the Plugshare filters for N. America, but there are actually probably 50% more that are lumped under the "other" category. So theoretically, we are talking about so many apps, each with your CC info on file. Given the rate of security breaches these days, each one of these is a security exposure. Maintaining them all, nothing less than a nightmare.

Sure, that is extreme, none of us routinely travel outside of a relatively small circle, and many cross continent routes are served by a handful of networks well enough to skip many of the bit player networks.

Recently, we went through 4 new CC from our bank, we kept seeing fraudulent activity and each time, I had to update CC info in a dozen charging apps. Some charge $1 then credit back to validate the card, and in the course, I had the card freeze due to suspected fraudulent activity because of all the validation hits. So the next time, I spread the updates over the course of several days, 2 at a time. If that had happened on the road, what a nightmare with limited network coverage.

In the large multinational corporation I worked for, I held a position which was sort of an enforcer for sales process used globally for thousands of products, hundreds of product managers. Each product team routinely came up with great ideas and asked us to allow them to use them. More often than not, we said no, because sales people get too confused with too many different processes and tools. In other words, we were responsible for containing shelter skelter!

The public charging industry has no such standards controls, sure the communications protocols are standard, but the way you activate charging varies, sometimes only slightly, but collectively, all the little differences add unnecessary confusion, particularly for new owners, or new networks.

So, P&C attempts to address the multi app, multi account, and varying process problems. In its current state, it hasn't achieved that yet, P&C isnt widely supported...but you have to start somewhere.

As stated above, there are still some kinks to be ironed out. In my mind, the discounted charging part is one of the biggest remaining challenges, and it going to take some innovative thinking and broad coordination. And again, for the automakers and networks, the more standard those improvements are, the quicker companies will embrace them.

So, in its current form, it isn't such a game changer, particularly for people who are able to use only a handful of networks in the circles they travel in. But, it has the potential to create an incredibly simple solution if the players can work through the remaining pain points, and they will, eventually.

 

Tap and pay using your phone's built in wallet app is pretty secure. With credit cards, it can be, though it depends on whether the bank that issued the card did it right. There was a research attack 20 years ago that found many cards exposed names and card numbers in the clear. The banks claimed those were aberrations, and that "most" cards were encrypted to prevent that. It's likely the tech has gotten more secure in the intervening years, but I don't work in the banking industry, so can't say if their policies have kept up. When they were moving away from primary reliance on magnetic stripes, the US banks opted for the less secure, and less convenient, chip and signature method, rather than the chip and PIN that more of the rest of the world adopted. The reason for this was because signature verification was more complex, they could charge more per transaction. I'll leave it to the imagination of the reader to guess how much of this extra processing cost was actually devoted to enhanced signature verification methods.
One potential problem with using tap to pay for charging is that most countries limit them to low value transactions without additional verification. In much of Europe, for example, the limit might be €25 or €50 before the user is prompted to enter their PIN. This needs a working PIN pad, which is another thing that can go wrong. This won't impact RAN chargers in the US, since most cards aren't PIN enabled, so don't have that security check.