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I'm not even a driver so I am a bit clueless. Are EV stations seriously not standardised? i.e. Is it the conventional equivalent of going to any petrol station

I'm not even a driver so I am a bit clueless. Are EV stations seriously not standardised? i.e. Is it the conventional equivalent of going to any petrol station and having to find a fuel pump that isn't leaded/unleaded/diesel but is more like trying to find the one that matches to your brand of car? This seems absurd.

secabeen 6y ago
They are mostly standardized, but the UX still sucks. Tesla takes care of all the billing on their backend, based on vehicle VIN transmitted through the cable. All the other vendors have to collect a credit card or identify the user somehow, which is not as simple as it could be.
- not2b 6y ago
  I'm confused. When I gas up my Prius I pay with a credit card. It isn't hard. What's the problem with needing a credit card to pay at a charging station? Requiring an app is stupid, but inserting the card takes a few seconds. The other problems (limited locations and hours, broken charging stations) are real ones, but I don't think this is.
  - aidenn0 6y ago
    It's a "real problem" in the sense that it exists. GP forgot "you need to be a member of our petrol club to fill up" as an added issue. Some of this is due to the slow speed. If it took 45 minutes to fill-up your car, then you might want to get a notification of some sort if the pump shut off only 5 minutes into filling. Really that could be solved by punching in a phone number and getting an SMS though.
  - secabeen 6y ago
    None of the alternate charging solutions I've seen are just swipe a credit card. They all want some way to notify you back when your charge session is nearing completion, or if you get unplugged unexpectedly. They also want the data on your usage individually identified, so they can sell/mine it. They do that with an app, or a fob or whatever, but it's all way more involved than just swiping a card.
  - jsight 6y ago
    The stations are unstaffed and card reader issues are common.
  - toast0 6y ago
    I've never seen a charging station with a place to swipe or dip a card. Maybe they can tap to pay, but I've never tried. (I drive a PHEV, so if it's hard or costs a lot of money to charge, I'll just use gas)
- rootusrootus 6y ago
  > based on vehicle VIN transmitted through the cable I thought Tesla used the car's wireless connection to handle authorization and billing?
gameswithgo 6y ago
there are standards for the plugs and adapters so you can charge any given brand of car at most brands of chargers.
spiznnx 6y ago
They are standardized, as far as the high power electronics go. But imagine having to install the "Chevron" app to pay to fuel up at Chevron, no big billboards with the price visible from the street (and prices wildly varying from free to $6/gal), some gas stations billing by minute instead of by gallons, half of the stations hidden in a dense parking lot/structure or "for retail customers only" and 1/10 pumps in the US being out of order.
- mFixman 6y ago
  So the only thing that makes a Tesla charging station different from the rest is that they appear in the map of the Tesla app? That sounds reasonable, but I don't understand how it can be a "killer feature or Tesla" when Ford could just show them in their electric cars.
  - nickik 6y ago
    Tesla have their own custom plug. They appear on the map in the car and the car tells you if the station is full (or partially broken) of people and potentially re-routes you. Tesla charge location also usually have multiple very high performance chargers. Tesla chargers are usually higher at charging that the waste majority of other chargers. Payment is fully integrated with your Tesla account. So its drive in, plug in, wait, plug out and drive away. Pretty much non of that works consistently for other networks and the are usually slower and you have to spend there longer as well. There are standards for the plug, standards, Europe is well standardized, US a bit less, China is a bigger mess. Important to note however, the plug is standard, the payment system on the other hand is not. Or rather it is partially standardized but the software compatibility might not actually work very well or is simply not implemented at all.
pornel 6y ago
They're as standard as USB: there are a few different flavors of cables, and wildly different speeds.
mohaine 6y ago
They are standardized, but the standard (at least in the US) was less than advanced so if you wanted things like a data connection between the charger and the car you had to roll your own. Without this you can't do things like: 1) Have 2 cars share capacity. The car will decide how much wattage to draw so you have to limit each car to supply/number_of_chargers so that you don't over draw your supply. With data connection you have them share the available wattage, allowing cars to pull what is currently available, often this is more than supply/number_of_chargers as charger will empty or underdrawing due to charge state. 2) Auto bill. Tesla chargers have NO interface other than the plug. You literally just plug it in. This has changed now but Telsas have been pretty common for a long time here.
xeromal 6y ago
I think the thing I hate the most about 3rd party chargers is how many charger per the minute rather than kilowatt. Their shitty charger can put out half the rated throughput but they still make the same money
- jsight 6y ago
  That is largely a function of state rules that make it hard to charge $/KWh without falling under a different (and often onerous) set of regulations. It doesn't have to be super expensive this way, though. Both Tesla and Electrify America offer decent per minute rates here. EVGo here is over twice as expensive and tends to underperform on charge rate, depending on the state of charge. Or at least I hope it improves at higher charge levels... I think it is amperage limited like CHAdeMO.
- vegardx 6y ago
  You can't effectively do that since the spot price per kilowatt-hour changes drastically from every minute. The per minute pricing reflects that, so you don't have to worry about fluctuating prices. It also add a "tax" for "hogging" the chargers, as the rate of which you're able to charge drops significantly after some time. You're probably being gauged compared to the true cost per kilowatt-hour, but that just mean there's room for more competition.
  - xeromal 6y ago
    I understand that, but I'll take an average even at the benefit of the distributor rather than per minute pricing. Imagine if we had to pay for gas by per second.
- theshrike79 6y ago
  Per-minute charging prevents people with crappy cars (PHEV, older EV) from hogging HVDC charging locations. They'll do it once, see the bill and never do it again. Basically if your PHEV can only take in like 15kW from a charger it's not cost-effective to charge from a HVDC charger that costs 80 cents a minute. But if your car can get 300kW from the same charger, it becomes useful again.
jsight 6y ago
There are standards, but like all standards there are multiple to choose from and at least one major non-standard. In the US, the big ones are Tesla, CCS, and CHAdeMO, in roughly that order of popularity. Its a bit like Diesel vs E85 vs premium vs plus vs regular, except with the added mix of having one branded version. Tesla's is largely the result of getting this stuff figured out back in 2012. Back then, standardization wasn't really an option.
u678u 6y ago
Its like Apple. All the connectors are the same, except Tesla which has its own standard. You can get adapters though.
- robotresearcher 6y ago
  > 'can get adapters' An adapter to the generic standard (ChargePoint, etc) was included with my Model 3.
rootusrootus 6y ago
Standardized, but with several standards up until CCS1 became the defacto choice for every new car [other than Tesla]. But the stations seem to be only reluctantly installed; so they come in small groups, poorly maintained, crappy interface, and in many cases brutally expensive. Some of that is because of local regulations on who can sell power by the kWh, so the charging companies had to use per-minute billing. It's coming around, but it's rough around the edges. I have a Tesla and a Bolt, and supercharging is definitely superior. But we haven't really had any trouble with DC fast charging the Bolt, either, like some folks have. In either case we only DC fast charge once every few months, 99% of the time we plug in at home with our own L2 outlet.
ridaj 6y ago
They're more or less standardized. There's different networks and plug systems but there's some federation of maps and you can pay with credit card at most. Compared with Tesla, in the US there's just way less chargers of two kinds for other EV owners: fast chargers (which are mostly useful as long-ish pit stops for long road trips), and destination chargers (things you can plug in overnight at your hotel or wherever it is you're sleeping. There's plenty of slow chargers (so called level 2) in downtown areas but those barely give you a courtesy charge. You'd have to stay plugged in overnight to get any meaningful range out of those, but they tend not to be located where you sleep. Add to that the fact that whatever stations there are tend to be unreliable, and taking even a 200 mile road trip carries its lot of unwelcome surprises. My understanding is that in Europe Tesla is on a path to join the other cars' standard because the situation is reverse. My hope is that in the US long term as well, they will be forced to join forces (realizing that I might as well hope for Apple to join the USB charger bandwagon for their phones)

secabeen 6y ago

They are mostly standardized, but the UX still sucks. Tesla takes care of all the billing on their backend, based on vehicle VIN transmitted through the cable. All the other vendors have to collect a credit card or identify the user somehow, which is not as simple as it could be.

not2b 6y ago
I'm confused. When I gas up my Prius I pay with a credit card. It isn't hard. What's the problem with needing a credit card to pay at a charging station? Requiring an app is stupid, but inserting the card takes a few seconds. The other problems (limited locations and hours, broken charging stations) are real ones, but I don't think this is.
- aidenn0 6y ago
  It's a "real problem" in the sense that it exists. GP forgot "you need to be a member of our petrol club to fill up" as an added issue. Some of this is due to the slow speed. If it took 45 minutes to fill-up your car, then you might want to get a notification of some sort if the pump shut off only 5 minutes into filling. Really that could be solved by punching in a phone number and getting an SMS though.
- secabeen 6y ago
  None of the alternate charging solutions I've seen are just swipe a credit card. They all want some way to notify you back when your charge session is nearing completion, or if you get unplugged unexpectedly. They also want the data on your usage individually identified, so they can sell/mine it. They do that with an app, or a fob or whatever, but it's all way more involved than just swiping a card.
- jsight 6y ago
  The stations are unstaffed and card reader issues are common.
- toast0 6y ago
  I've never seen a charging station with a place to swipe or dip a card. Maybe they can tap to pay, but I've never tried. (I drive a PHEV, so if it's hard or costs a lot of money to charge, I'll just use gas)
rootusrootus 6y ago
> based on vehicle VIN transmitted through the cable I thought Tesla used the car's wireless connection to handle authorization and billing?

gameswithgo 6y ago

there are standards for the plugs and adapters so you can charge any given brand of car at most brands of chargers.

spiznnx 6y ago

They are standardized, as far as the high power electronics go. But imagine having to install the "Chevron" app to pay to fuel up at Chevron, no big billboards with the price visible from the street (and prices wildly varying from free to $6/gal), some gas stations billing by minute instead of by gallons, half of the stations hidden in a dense parking lot/structure or "for retail customers only" and 1/10 pumps in the US being out of order.

mFixman 6y ago
So the only thing that makes a Tesla charging station different from the rest is that they appear in the map of the Tesla app? That sounds reasonable, but I don't understand how it can be a "killer feature or Tesla" when Ford could just show them in their electric cars.
- nickik 6y ago
  Tesla have their own custom plug. They appear on the map in the car and the car tells you if the station is full (or partially broken) of people and potentially re-routes you. Tesla charge location also usually have multiple very high performance chargers. Tesla chargers are usually higher at charging that the waste majority of other chargers. Payment is fully integrated with your Tesla account. So its drive in, plug in, wait, plug out and drive away. Pretty much non of that works consistently for other networks and the are usually slower and you have to spend there longer as well. There are standards for the plug, standards, Europe is well standardized, US a bit less, China is a bigger mess. Important to note however, the plug is standard, the payment system on the other hand is not. Or rather it is partially standardized but the software compatibility might not actually work very well or is simply not implemented at all.

pornel 6y ago

They're as standard as USB: there are a few different flavors of cables, and wildly different speeds.

mohaine 6y ago

They are standardized, but the standard (at least in the US) was less than advanced so if you wanted things like a data connection between the charger and the car you had to roll your own. Without this you can't do things like: 1) Have 2 cars share capacity. The car will decide how much wattage to draw so you have to limit each car to supply/number_of_chargers so that you don't over draw your supply. With data connection you have them share the available wattage, allowing cars to pull what is currently available, often this is more than supply/number_of_chargers as charger will empty or underdrawing due to charge state. 2) Auto bill. Tesla chargers have NO interface other than the plug. You literally just plug it in. This has changed now but Telsas have been pretty common for a long time here.

xeromal 6y ago

I think the thing I hate the most about 3rd party chargers is how many charger per the minute rather than kilowatt. Their shitty charger can put out half the rated throughput but they still make the same money

jsight 6y ago
That is largely a function of state rules that make it hard to charge $/KWh without falling under a different (and often onerous) set of regulations. It doesn't have to be super expensive this way, though. Both Tesla and Electrify America offer decent per minute rates here. EVGo here is over twice as expensive and tends to underperform on charge rate, depending on the state of charge. Or at least I hope it improves at higher charge levels... I think it is amperage limited like CHAdeMO.
vegardx 6y ago
You can't effectively do that since the spot price per kilowatt-hour changes drastically from every minute. The per minute pricing reflects that, so you don't have to worry about fluctuating prices. It also add a "tax" for "hogging" the chargers, as the rate of which you're able to charge drops significantly after some time. You're probably being gauged compared to the true cost per kilowatt-hour, but that just mean there's room for more competition.
- xeromal 6y ago
  I understand that, but I'll take an average even at the benefit of the distributor rather than per minute pricing. Imagine if we had to pay for gas by per second.
theshrike79 6y ago
Per-minute charging prevents people with crappy cars (PHEV, older EV) from hogging HVDC charging locations. They'll do it once, see the bill and never do it again. Basically if your PHEV can only take in like 15kW from a charger it's not cost-effective to charge from a HVDC charger that costs 80 cents a minute. But if your car can get 300kW from the same charger, it becomes useful again.

jsight 6y ago

There are standards, but like all standards there are multiple to choose from and at least one major non-standard. In the US, the big ones are Tesla, CCS, and CHAdeMO, in roughly that order of popularity. Its a bit like Diesel vs E85 vs premium vs plus vs regular, except with the added mix of having one branded version. Tesla's is largely the result of getting this stuff figured out back in 2012. Back then, standardization wasn't really an option.

u678u 6y ago

Its like Apple. All the connectors are the same, except Tesla which has its own standard. You can get adapters though.

robotresearcher 6y ago
> 'can get adapters' An adapter to the generic standard (ChargePoint, etc) was included with my Model 3.

rootusrootus 6y ago

Standardized, but with several standards up until CCS1 became the defacto choice for every new car [other than Tesla]. But the stations seem to be only reluctantly installed; so they come in small groups, poorly maintained, crappy interface, and in many cases brutally expensive. Some of that is because of local regulations on who can sell power by the kWh, so the charging companies had to use per-minute billing. It's coming around, but it's rough around the edges. I have a Tesla and a Bolt, and supercharging is definitely superior. But we haven't really had any trouble with DC fast charging the Bolt, either, like some folks have. In either case we only DC fast charge once every few months, 99% of the time we plug in at home with our own L2 outlet.

ridaj 6y ago

They're more or less standardized. There's different networks and plug systems but there's some federation of maps and you can pay with credit card at most. Compared with Tesla, in the US there's just way less chargers of two kinds for other EV owners: fast chargers (which are mostly useful as long-ish pit stops for long road trips), and destination chargers (things you can plug in overnight at your hotel or wherever it is you're sleeping. There's plenty of slow chargers (so called level 2) in downtown areas but those barely give you a courtesy charge. You'd have to stay plugged in overnight to get any meaningful range out of those, but they tend not to be located where you sleep. Add to that the fact that whatever stations there are tend to be unreliable, and taking even a 200 mile road trip carries its lot of unwelcome surprises. My understanding is that in Europe Tesla is on a path to join the other cars' standard because the situation is reverse. My hope is that in the US long term as well, they will be forced to join forces (realizing that I might as well hope for Apple to join the USB charger bandwagon for their phones)