Technology ConnectionsI'm ripping the band-aid off.
Tesla won the plug war - and that's good news!
A surprisingly good series of events have unfolded, and this video is my mea culpa. Also, Sorry, John!Links 'n' stuffHere's a playlist to all of my EV-relate...
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aSyd🪿@TechConnectify While I completely agree that plug and charge is not the way to go, putting a regular card payment terminal in charge stations isn't as easy as you might think it is. (Full disclosure: Developing payment stuff for use in charge infrastructure is what pays my bills)
In the video you say that just an nfc reader would be enough to facilitate apple pay (and similar) payments, but that's not the case. Anything that interfaces with credit cards (which includes apple pay at al) has to be certified through and through and there's only a handful of companies that have those certifications. Adding a payment terminal to a charge station can easily cost upwards of 1000$ per EVSE (because most solutions out there can't have one payment terminal for multiple charge stations)
The EU is going to be mandating all charge stations to have a credit card payment terminal within the next few years despite that, which will lead to a much more streamlined experience, even if it slows down the building of new charging infrastructure a bit due to the increased cost. Maybe the US could try this "regulation" thing too at some point.
Regarding NACS being the better plug, I feel like that's a bit of a stretch tbh. While it is definitely sleeker, as someone whose work touches on software that car manufacturers build and sell more than most people's, I do not trust them to implement the switching between A/C and D/C cleanly. Especially not with adaptors in mind. I am pretty certain that this will lead to fires down the line. Using the same pins for this just makes me nervous, especially considering how small they seem to be and that the one you showed in your video seems heavily rusted
In the video you say that just an nfc reader would be enough to facilitate apple pay (and similar) payments, but that's not the case. Anything that interfaces with credit cards (which includes apple pay at al) has to be certified through and through and there's only a handful of companies that have those certifications. Adding a payment terminal to a charge station can easily cost upwards of 1000$ per EVSE (because most solutions out there can't have one payment terminal for multiple charge stations)
The EU is going to be mandating all charge stations to have a credit card payment terminal within the next few years despite that, which will lead to a much more streamlined experience, even if it slows down the building of new charging infrastructure a bit due to the increased cost. Maybe the US could try this "regulation" thing too at some point.
Regarding NACS being the better plug, I feel like that's a bit of a stretch tbh. While it is definitely sleeker, as someone whose work touches on software that car manufacturers build and sell more than most people's, I do not trust them to implement the switching between A/C and D/C cleanly. Especially not with adaptors in mind. I am pretty certain that this will lead to fires down the line. Using the same pins for this just makes me nervous, especially considering how small they seem to be and that the one you showed in your video seems heavily rusted
@dysphoricunicorn Even if it costs $1000 per charger, DC fast chargers are $50,000+ machines. Nobody should be crying about that, frankly.
Re: sharing the pins, it used to make me nervous. But I can't deny that Tesla has been doing it from the start and so far things have gone well.
I think *CCS2* could be argued as technically superior to NACS. But CCS1 with its godawful latch... yeah. It's bad.
@dysphoricunicorn Also, yes the rust on that connector concerns me, but personally I chalk that up to that likely being a 5+ year old EVSE combined with Tesla's rather bad friction fit method of holding the plug in-place. They fall out rather easily from Tesla holsters, it seems, and since that was in a hotel parking lot, I'll bet that plug has landed in a salty pile of snow several times in its life.
I don't consider that a flaw of the connector, though, just Tesla's holster.