Adding to the rant
Like many countries, France has an near infinite number of charging stations, all of which require a different card and paid membership.
All of those companies used state funds to build their infrastructure.
Adding to the rant
Like many countries, France has an near infinite number of charging stations, all of which require a different card and paid membership.
All of those companies used state funds to build their infrastructure.
Really? It seems to me that wherever I go they use the same plug*, and I can charge with my debit card. (Except one place in Germany, but I think it was an error in the payment system.)
Yes, there’s technically two different plugs, but they go in the same socket in my car. It just that the fast ones have a larger plug.
The problem is that some of them are much cheaper if you have the right card, but I believe the most expensive ones are still cheaper than fueling an ICE car.
In North America, there have been several competing standards for years. Manufacturers finally seem to be coalescing around NACS (nee Tesla), but there are still a lot of cars which use CCS (two different types, none of which are the EU CCS), J1772, and CHAdeMO. Adapters abound, but it’s a mess.
Yeah I think it’s mainly North America (us?) that’s the problem.
However the standards process worked, it created poor choices and was not effective. Twice. At least we’re finally coalescing on a de facto standard, and NACS is better than the previous two choices
But yeah the app situation is bad. While I appreciated using chargers that use my cars internal ID, and just worked, that clearly doesn’t scale. Now that we’re trying to scale out to general use so we really need credit card readers instead of a plethora of apps.
Not requiring an app was one of the prerequisites for federal incentive money, but the short-sighted administration retracted that