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by WelcomeShorty 783 days ago
- May not require a membership. Must accept credit cards. May not charge more without a membership. Must display price per KwH before charging. Phone-based and car-based payment interfaces allowed but must not be required of the customer.

Cries in European. It'd solve some of my absolute pet peeves with charging: no membership, no over charging without membership AND display price BEFORE charging.

The "bill shock" experience is real here. It happens I pay 2x the average price at random locations without any possibility to see that before I'm finished.
1 comments
akmarinov 782 days ago
Good news then, the EU has passed the same regulation - https://www.theverge.com/23806690/eu-ev-fast-charger-60km-la...
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kkfx 782 days ago
The current situation here (France) is:

- ALMOST all highways with a fast charger every $reasonable_amount_of_km

- very few accept direct payments BUT with terrible UIs (like you know how much you paid but not how much energy you have charged (yes, really, many visualize the amount paid after energy counters get zeroed/disappeared from the display)

- many do demand crapplications that are a pain to use, buggy as hell, sometimes in places where the phone get no network, and of course no local AP to use the sole charging app locally, many allow charging, then the sole way to stop is stop from the car side and so on

In Italy is even worse, first because of the prices, then because of the scarcity of charging points, thirdly because many apps are not meant to be "international", i.e. I'm Italian, but I live in France, so I have french residence and payments cards etc, well, I keep getting errors, because if I'm Italian then I must offer an Italian bank card, an Italian ID and address and so on, otherwise I need to be French...

At least in terms of uptime they tend to works well in both countries all the time. But do not try to go southern or eastern in the EU, there you get almost no chargers at all. Also DO count outside highways all roaming tariffs, take a look at https://chargemap.com/map to understand. With certain roaming combination you might end up paying 10kWh like 20€ instead of 2€.

This is the proof we need PUBLIC infra, not private one. The public have the money and the interest to be everywhere (not only where they earn more) and be standard, open to anyone offering a good service. The private sector is good to pick innovation and find ways to spread it, but to really spread it it's the public that must step in.

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