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The lack of innovation in payment technologies is a huge barrier. It should be entirely feasible to "set up a payment card" within a secure computing system lik
by matthewdgreen 3y ago
The lack of innovation in payment technologies is a huge barrier. It should be entirely feasible to "set up a payment card" within a secure computing system like a car's computer (perhaps using an inexpensive commodity secure enclave processor), and then securely pay for charging services over an arbitrary wire protocol like NACS/CCS without the need to make an account for each provider. Apple and Google each managed to realize a similar functionality for NFC, but it took their enormous market power (and a huge mess of technical innovation that should have come from the payment card industry directly, rather than requiring still more proprietary systems.) In Europe they had to create an entirely new payment overlay called Plug & Charge, but it only handles that one application (and doesn't exist in the US.)
A good chunk of the problems in charging stem from the fact that we allowed basic infrastructure like payments to be locked up within these private companies, rather than mandating standards.
- amluto 3y agoI would settle for the basics before insisting on actual innovation. I also want chargers to allow using a credit card (or Apple Pay or whatever) as an alternative to whatever is programmed into the car.
- matthewdgreen 3y agoSure. What I'm describing is essentially Apple Pay, just not limited to mobile phones and an NFC interface. If the payment card industry had looked a decade forward and developed something like Apple Pay for IoT devices, then you could enter a credit card to your car and it would make the payment directly over the charging cable. They didn't do this, and as a result we have to use NFC, magstripes, proprietary wire protocols, or else live in Europe. It's a bummer.
- vel0city 3y agoEurope uses the same CCS payment exchange protocol for EV charging payment communication as the US.
- matthewdgreen 3y agoYes. But this isn’t a general payment protocol that the payment industry developed to facilitate convenient payment applications. It’s an application-specific protocol that had to be developed at enormous cost for the specific application of charging and only really happened because EU regulators pushed very hard on charging companies and manufacturers to realize it. The US gets to benefit from it (if we’re lucky) because Europe did the work, although it’s not supported by Tesla and many of the smaller charging services don’t support it. My point is that a IoT payment protocol should have been a part of the EMV standard, the same one that lets me use my credit card while overseas. We shouldn’t have to rely on such a huge government-backed effort specific to every specific business sector where a device might need to pay for a service.
- vel0city 3y ago> and doesn't exist in the US. It does exist and I've used it many times. Its the exact same protocol.
- matthewdgreen 3y agoYes I just learned it’s supported by EA. But not by some of the other charging services.
- hospadar 3y agoIf only there were some kind of ... card ... that asserted you had ... credit... we could call it a "credit card"