Charging? Preferably with a credit card!

Now imagine you're driving comfortably on the A3 heading south. With your nice new electric car. And then you pull into the rest area where your navigation system promises charging stations. Everything is going smoothly because you've just enjoyed a good run on the highway. And you pull in with just about a kilometer of range left.

And then you're hit with a shock. Because your charging card doesn't work here. You have a roaming-capable Wuppertal North card. But this is Wuppertal South. The station says you can order an access pass during office hours, which will be sent to you within a week.

Frankly, who comes up with the idiotic idea of inventing a separate payment method for electric car charging? There's nothing like this in any other aspect of life. Imagine the following situation at a kiosk: "No, you can't buy the FAZ here. You have the Niedersachsen magazine payment card. But here only the NRW card works. Yes, the FAZ is regionally cross-cutting, but our payment card isn't."

That's why it's a good thing Germany has decided that, from mid-2023, all charging stations must also offer payment with normal credit cards. This lowers barriers and provides access with ubiquitous payment methods. Hold the card, charge, done.

But humanity wouldn't be itself if a few smart alecks didn't immediately complicate even this simple solution. Many providers have saved effort (putting it on each individual user) and can only settle flat rates. As if someone knew how long they have to park for 5 euros of flat-rate electricity.

Or they have only integrated the park-in-park-out system. With this system, the (same) credit card must be held to the reader again before ending the charging process. For professionals with multiple payment cards, this is an annoying memory game and highly impractical. This implementation also leads to defective charging cables because users don't understand the system and try to yank the still-blocked plug out of the car.

What does this mean?

Building good and, above all, intuitively usable charging infrastructure is strenuous and requires a lot of brainpower. The natural law is therefore: when charging, someone has to suffer. The question is: does the provider of your charging station make themselves suffer, or you?