So full disclosure: I work as a software developer for an EV charging company and I'm currently directly involved in their contactless payment efforts.
A lot of the problems of payment for EV charging ultimately comes down to banks/payment gateways. A lot of them have quite tight time limits between a pre-auth and confirm which is sort of uniquely a problem for EV charging where there may be hours between when you take a pre-auth and the charge starts and when the charge ends and you can confirm the actual amount used. There are also some that basically take the view that it's a new and scary market with a different risk profile and they want nothing to do with it. That leaves you with quite a small pool of financial institutions you can work with and they all know this and will try to screw you over on transaction fees and/or will treat any support requests as the lowest possible priority. This is even more true right now with legislation pending to force all charge point operators to implement contactless payments within the next year or so.
I was actually quite interested to see how the pay-at-pump system "negotiated" the pre-auth down until it was accepted. I'm guessing it effectively uses a binary search - start at £140 then if that fails try £70 then £35 then £18 (rounded from £17.50) then £9 and presumably if that hadn't worked would then try £5, £3, £2 and £1. I honestly hadn't seen that done before and I might just have a go at convincing the powers that be that it would a decent system to implement for EV payment.
On his point about the government mandating that charging station should be able to take a range of RFID tokens (like his Octopus Electroverse card) - that's actually
sort of in the draft legislation although it's pretty vague as to how they expect it all to work. The problem here is again more of a business issue than a technical one: the idea is basically that you can split the actors in an EV charging transaction into two, the MSP (Mobility Service Provider) who handle user accounts and billing and so forth and the CPO (Charge Point Operator) who install and run the actually charge points and who have to pay for the electricity. The margins on EV charging are relatively low - particularly on the slower AC chargers (partly due to the fact that everyone already buys electricity for their house and so has a baseline for how much it costs whereas I imagine very few people have much of an idea of how much their petrol is getting marked up) and third party MSPs (like Octopus Electroverse) all want their cut so at the moment most CPOs are set up to have both parts of the process in house and I don't really see this changing until they are forced to by law so we're just going to have to wait and see how it all shakes out I think.
news.sky.com
