228 The Paying For Your Charge Episode

Gary: Hi, I'm Gary and this is EV Musings, a podcast about renewables, electric vehicles and things that are interesting to electric vehicle owners. On the show today, we'll be looking at the whole minefield of paying for your charging. Before we start, I wanted to let you know that things are a little fluid here when it comes to episodes.

I usually plan out all 20 episodes of the season, cross fingers, and hope they all work out. This season has been a bit of a challenge and I've had to swap and change sequences and topics. It looks like we probably won't be talking about used EVs this season, or if we do end up doing it, it will be much later in the season than expected.

And perhaps my episode on EV insurance might be in jeopardy. Stay tuned for more. Our main topic of discussion today is paying for your charge.

Now I was buying something on a website the other day and I surfed the site, added stuff to my basket and went to the checkout. I was fully prepared to have to enter all my details into the site. But I was pleasantly surprised when I saw a little icon there that said, pay with Apple Pay.

I clicked it, my phone buzzed, validated my face ID and signalled to the site that I had paid. Because I used Apple Pay it knew who I was, where I lived and what payment method I was using. It was seamless and it worked first time.

Have you ever thought about how easy it is to pay for parking at a car park, cash, card etc. Have you ever wondered why it's so easy to pay for petrol at a pump, it's cash or card inside or a card at the pump itself. Have you ever thought about how easy it is to pay for things nowadays using tech such as smartwatches or things like Google Pay.

But it's not all sweetness and light when we look at things like that. Those of you who subscribe to my Patreon, and if you don't please consider it, you get early access to these episodes and several other benefits. You will know that Apple recently told Patreon that if anybody buys anything or subscribes to Patreon via the iPhone app, they will now be liable to the 30% surcharge that Apple levies on payments through their ecosystem.

If anyone is listening to this via my Patreon, don't worry, existing payments are fine, it's only new members to whom this will apply. Also if you are thinking of joining, do it via the web browser and not via your iPhone and you won't have the 30% surcharge. So we've hit a situation here where there are fees associated with this sort of technology that are quite steep.

Social cards such as Visa and American Express have always levied a charge for processing your payments and it can be quite high, up to about 5% in some cases. This covers the payment processor for things such as chargeback and fraud activity. But only Apple levy a 30% charge on their purchases.

Now we are currently living in an effective cashless society where you can pretty much pay for anything without using actual money. In fact some places specifically say no cash. One area where this is not so easy and seamless though is public EV charging.

blic Charge Point Regulations: 2023

There's contactless, RFID, an app, a subscription, plug and charge, a QR code, roaming services. In fact pretty much the only method you can't use to pay is cash and I'm sure there's some irony there. Now I want to have a chat about some of these methods and put forward a case to say that contactless is not the best even though it's the one everybody seems to want.

So here goes. Let's look at the different methods we've got out there. We've got contactless.

blic Charge Point Regulations: 2023

Now unfortunately this wasn't applied retrospectively which means that many existing chargers don't have the sort of thing we need for this. I'm looking at you Tesla. RFID is the next one.

Really simple. It's reliable. But it needs a different card for every service.

Apps. Always on the phone. Always easily accessible.

But you can need a different one for each charge point operator and they're very reliant on network connections. If you're in the middle of London that's fine. If you're up in the highlands of Scotland maybe not so much.

Plug and charge. It's quick and easy. The Tesla way.

But it's not widespread outside the Tesla infrastructure. Not all chargers are capable. Not all cars are capable.

Not all charge point operators are capable. A QR code. Bit of a last resort.

A code somewhere on the charge or links to a website to provide payment details. But it can't be prone to hacking with a fake QR code placed on top of the unit and there are examples of that out in the wild. And lastly we've got roaming.

A single service which allows you to access multiple charge point operators. This can be done through a single RFID or it can be app based. Now in theory it allows you to access all units through one card or one app.

But in practice not all roaming services cover all networks and in fact there are certain networks, certain big networks at the moment that are not on any roaming services. So here's my thesis. In the big scheme of things the best solution is the one which has the access to the most networks.

It's reliable in that it works quickly and doesn't rely on network connections and it gives you the quickest response. And the answer is a roaming RFID card. The market leader in the UK at the moment is Octopus Electroverse which provides access at a discount for Octopus customers and it gives you access to the vast majority of the major UK and European networks.

Now podcast sponsor ZapMap, they have a ZapPay option within their app which is a very very good roaming option but they don't yet have an RFID card solution that links into that. This means that they're at the mercy of network and connectivity issues. With an RFID card this doesn't happen.

And we're chatting to ZapMap later in the season and we'll ask the question about RFID cards. But there are other aspects of charging that need to be considered as well. Fleets, for example, they're a completely different kettle of fish.

Fleets need the ability to work on many networks and keep the details of the charge separate from that same individual who may be charging for private use versus work use if you're sharing a car between work and personal or the ability to transfer the payment to another driver if you're sharing a vehicle with multiple drivers. There are a number of leaders in this field including Power and Allstar slash Mina although again Octopus Electroverse have brought out a fleet offering now. Now this is obviously a complex area with lots of permutations.

It's also leading to issues with people getting payment anxiety. Now what is that and what can we do about it? Well let's bring in Sarah Sloman to help me work through it.

Sara: Hi, I'm Sarah Sloman from Paythrough. I'm the Chief Strategy Officer there and it's very much our mission to revolutionise the experience for drivers at charge points when they're paying for the charge that they wanted to receive.

Gary: Now famously Sarah you've been on the podcast before talking about living without a home charger and at the moment there's a large discrepancy between the prices paid for home charging and public charging.

Is this sustainable?

Sara: I really do hope that we will see a significant reduction in that price however I think it's really important to point out these charge point operators I don't believe are rolling around in profit and being delighted by that high price. It's very much the price up front to pay for the infrastructure and the investment that has been agreed and that sort of payback period means you've got to charge that much pence per kilowatt hour.

But I have seen some amazing things happen just this week alone we saw Instavolt have introduced their more preferable rates if you use their app so they're calling it off-peak pricings they're not the first to do it Tesla has been doing it for a long time meaning the consumer suddenly has choice and I think consumers will vote with their wheels and go somewhere they find the price more palatable.

Gary: One of the reasons you're here today Sarah is because Paythrough recently put out a white paper around this concept of payment anxiety. Now we know about range anxiety that's come and gone and we know about charger anxiety being concerned that a charger won't be available or working when you stop for a charge.

Talk to me about this white paper and payment anxiety.

Sara: We launched our white paper at the Oxford EV Summit and I was really delighted to see lots of people downloading it by the QR code it's available on our website of course but identifies four key messages which I have written down here so I'll come on to those a bit later but it's really just about what can we do not just pay through this is a big collaborative piece we can't solve this on our own we're a part of a chain so we are part of a payment chain who needs to one understand what the drivers want and two this is the one I really really do like to do try to inform the charge point operators who are procuring their payment systems what they should perhaps be looking for or asking for of their payment service provider and that information comes from me as an EV person not as a payments person so it's a match made in heaven the best type of payment is the one that you don't see or feel it just happens the invisible payment is what you want not the one you worry about not the one you don't understand just the one that happens is the payment you want really excited to see where pay through go next we're really working hard on car parks so sort of destination charging but also contactless payment as well.

Gary: Do you have an example of the sort of payment anxiety we're talking about?

There's another phrase in the market which I find really interesting it's actually Sam Clark from the EV cafe who I think started it although there is a debate with the Green Fleet team about that but I'm backing Sam of course and he says I don't stop to charge I charge because I've stopped now we've just come back from the most incredible event ever this year car fest was mind-blowing and thank you personally Gary for your support and your excellent questions I was well three days after a festival I was lured in by the golden arches let's just put it that way and I thought I'm going there and I spotted a row of charges and I thought to myself ah yeah I could do with I could do with a charge so there I go go in plug in the car come back and it hasn't charged so I did I didn't stop the charge I thought I would charge because I've stopped but unfortunately my contactless payment failed to go through despite the machine clunking and making the right beeping sounds something to do with my my apple pay just didn't work don't know why just fluke but by that time I was done you know been 15 minutes in the shop and was ready to roll again so we are moving towards this phase of payment anxiety so I was perfectly happy until I realized my payment hadn't gone through nothing wrong with the machine it was the terminal or perhaps it was the receiving communication from the payment terminal regardless it wasn't the machine and also because I didn't choose to use the app I didn't get a notification to tell me that it hadn't worked

Gary: let's look at that a little closer after I left car fest on on the Sunday I headed up to a brand new eight charger hub that had opened literally 24 hours earlier around the corner from where I live now I'm not going to mention the brand but out of the eight units that were there six of the credit card readers had security violation errors on them and this is 24 hours after it had been commissioned now we never seem to have issues paying for petrol with a card reader we never seem to have issues with pop-up food stores in fields in the middle of nowhere at for example car fest who are using card readers we never seem to have issue paying for parking at card readers what's so special about car chargers

Sara: yeah and when you said it was such a new site I do have slight empathy there because I'm wondering having been in the installer environment maybe they hadn't been properly commissioned at that stage now I did get into a bit of a pickle with us with a cvo about the fact why do you always have just one type of contactless terminal reader like I understand that setup costs are expensive and the maintenance costs and sort of looking after those is expensive but so is having an entire rack of chargers go down across the country so if one payment terminal company the most popular one we all know fails or goes down it's either a free vent situation or a bad customer service situation neither of which anybody wants so I'm sure it's rare I'm sure it's rare even if it isn't rare I bet no one would admit it though it strikes me that if you had 12 beautiful shiny easy to use accessible charges why don't you do six of them half of them with one type of payment terminal and the other with the other because then at least you've got two different companies to sort of hang your hat on if something goes wrong with one you've still got others the other thing that annoys me about chargers and I also similarly do know how hard it is to program a screen on a charger but wouldn't it be a wonderful world but bearing in mind most of this is cloud-based he'd be able to upload an instant message on that screen going bright bright letters this charger isn't taking contactless payments you know when you get a little bit of sellotape a4 paper going cash only or it could be like app only today or rfid only today card reader standing or we'll give you a discount if you use an app today that's what I want to see let's learn from the consumer behavior we so enjoy like you say at the festival buying food craft market like single person with a single charging it's so easy to charge your account with one tap of a card with a sum up machine why is it so hard to take my money when I want to pay for my charging?

Gary: now I chatted with a couple of charge point operators on this show who have a rather complex method of pricing their tariffs the amount you pay varies depending on the time of day the payment method the power of the charger in most cases it's something like a three by three matrix where the actual cost per kilowatt hour could be one of nine different prices the pay-through payment anxiety report talked about people who don't mind variable prices as long as they know what they're going to be charged

Sara: payments continue to be confusing because there's this movement to making sure the driver knows what they're going to be paying before they start the charge and the fact that that price can't change throughout their charging session that's a that's quite a good thing I think because at least you can sort of do quick maths right I'll just put 20 quid in or something but when you've got this matrix of potentially nine different prices depending on your method of payment or your time of payment I think that's fairly complex I can see why they've done it I can totally understand that it costs a bit more to process a contactless credit card payment than it does to process like an app-based payment that's simple and also depends if they want the receipt service or everything else that's wrapped into the payment element so we've we did an interview with 200 respondents to a survey and then some more in-depth interviews after that and I've got it right in front of me because our brilliant team has summarized it for us so challenge number one was deemed as what will I be charged so that's exactly this what is the pence per kilowatt hour equated to when I've filled up my car or taken as much energy as I want what will that final bill be are there any hidden costs is there a connection service fee as well will I pay extra to have a text message to say my charging session is nearly finished the next two points in the payment anxiety report are users still pay in lots of different ways at different charges despite the oft-stated preference for a single solution and Users face lots of frustrating issues at the charge point that hamper their ability to charge, including cards being rejected, having to download or update apps, lack of mobile connectivity to do so, and payments not going through.

Sara: I don't think anyone will refute any of those points. I want to focus on the final point a little if I may.

The current approach to pre-authorisation of payments is a major irritation. If I may say, that's probably something of an understatement. Sarah, talk to me about pre-authorisations.

Why is it that my mum can go to a supermarket and buy petrol, get a £99 pre-authorisation charge, which is gone almost as soon as the petrol is dispensed. But if I charge my car at the same supermarket chain, it's a different kettle of fish.

Sara: It's about your terms.

It's about your terms. It's what I came back to my point before. You've got to know what you're signing up to when you procure these payment systems.

Everybody's at fault there. There's probably a service level agreement that says, we don't need to return this money within 10 days, or we do need to return this money in 10 days. But there is a technical sort of fix for it, a hack.

But again, it all depends on the different parts of that payment chain, of which there's six or seven. People always just think it's the driver, the charge point operator. But then of course, you've got the payment terminal, you've got the merchant who's actually the one who's due to receive the money, it's their money to be paid.

And then yes, you've also got different banking systems, some of which are archaic, some of which are modern. I will credit a particular charge point operator that I have seen do this brilliantly. So MER, M-E-R, they do this system where not only is the pre-authorization very low, it's only 7 pounds 50 or something.

When I tapped, and I guess this is a good bad story, I had to tap four times to get it to start. So it took four lots of 7 pound 50, but within the hour they were back. So stress over, charge over started, not a problem, call center was excellent, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So I was really pleased to see that. That's putting the user first. That isn't sort of saying, well, I'm going to hold on to your money for a week now as punishment for you tapping four times, which is an unfortunate position to be in with the other ones.

So yeah, two advancements in technology that I've got my close eye on, one of which is incremental authorization, also sometimes called incremental pre-authorizations, you might hear it called both. This is where it's a bit more intelligent and something Paysphere are working on right now. So we can tell, or perhaps via the app, you're told how long you're going to be there for.

So you could just set it, you can toggle it as the owner of the energy. You can say, I'm just going to do tenors, 10 pound, 10 pound, 10 pound, when they start getting towards 20 pounds, I'm going to test that account again, because that's all the pre-auth does is just check the money's there, that you exist and the money exists, that's all it's for. And then you can claw it back if anything goes wrong.

So 10, maybe 20, maybe 30, but if it sort of got to 30, 29 pounds, I probably wouldn't bother to go above because hopefully you can tell that that charging session is not going to take too much longer. But it just means the user doesn't have to have one big hit. They can take what they want.

Another innovation that I just don't understand why we can't do in EV is there's a petrol station in Cheltenham, a Sainsbury's, where the driver can tap on a digital screen, what fuel they want, diesel, 20 quid, go. And that's it. It won't go 20 pounds of the penny.

It won't do a pre-authorisation. It just knows that it's 20 pounds. So I think that's brilliant.

I'm really trying to work out how that works. It does do 20 pounds, but it's only 20 pounds. It's 20 pounds that you want.

The other one is called, I think it's called auto reverse. So if I were to have a pre-authorisation of 45 quid on that annoying charger that I had to use, but then only use 20 pounds of that, that difference, that 20 quid would come straight back to me because I've already been tested for 45. So of course I can pay my 20.

And I think that makes really good sense for the driver.

Gary: I want to touch on something that's tangentially related to payments and that's receipts processing. Again, I want to relate this back to the petrol model.

If I go to a pump with a credit card on it, I can pump the fuel and when it's finished, I can get a receipt printed there and then. It's pretty much universal at all pumps with credit card terminals. But for charging, there isn't a single homogenised way of getting a receipt.

Some CPOs want you to go to a website and enter some data. Some want you to use their app. Some want you to scan a QR code.

Why isn't there a standardised way of getting receipts at charges?

Sara: We have an opportunity in the payments industry to release a little bit more data. So when you tap your card, so much data is stored when you do that.

Now in there is all your information, your name and your email address and your phone number. So if we were allowed to release that information instantly, and I mean instantly, then yes, you would see an email ping into your inbox. What we won't do is go back to Mexico, although some countries have still got paper opportunities.

I think it's Portugal, Spain, I've heard of at least those two, where charge points being installed do have a paper printout option. But that's the decision we made. It's an innovative industry.

Surely we don't have to go there. And let's not forget the EV industry was born for the private driver all those years ago, what 10 years now, now through to we're seeing a lot of fleet adoption. And I do think it's the who, who really needs a receipt.

You know, if you're self-employed, absolutely. If you are employed, absolutely, but you're more likely to use some kind of RFID system, which has an automated receipt functionality. I quite like those ones.

This is entirely personal. You mentioned Ionity earlier, and I quite like the fact that I can just scan a QR code to get my receipt. So I'm not worried at that point about the sort of QR code fraud, which again, everybody's working on to demystify.

But sometimes it's just nice to have that receipt on your inbox, particularly if you're, I don't know about you, but sometimes a little anxious about using my credit card. And at the time that was a tap and go one. So I just thought to myself, I would really like a receipt and I just scan the QR code.

All I had to do was auto fill on my iPhones and even type anything. And then the receipt was in my inbox and I could sort of have a bit of backup for my worry that my card was being tapped on a strange machine on a motorway services. That felt like a nice thing to do.

But generally, I personally don't need receipts. But then that's because I own my own vehicle as Gray Fleet and drive around with a certain amount of miles included. But I do empathise for those self-employed van drivers who do need and want a stack of automated receipts.

It would be fantastic if it would just be stored somewhere like within an app or with a certain file name where you can just find them when you need them, rather than to trawl through what would be my endless Gmail, a thousand emails a day rubbish, trying to find the receipt for a submission for expenses. Nightmare.

Gary: Of course, the 800 pound gorilla in the room when it comes to charging, and in particular, the payment processing, is plug and charge.

All this payment malarkey is a way of compensating for the fact that if you're not doing plug and charge, you don't know who the customer is. So you need pre-authorizations, et cetera, et cetera. Now we talked about plug and charge a number of times on the show, particularly in relation to charge point operators and manufacturers.

The manufacturers say their hardware can do it, the charge point operators say their software can do it. Fastnet have auto charge, but it isn't really plug and charge. Ionity can do it with some vehicles, but not all.

As far as I know, there doesn't seem to be a single reason why this can't be implemented. So what's the holdup?

Sara: Yeah, I think as far as you know, it's key there.

It's something that feels a bit mystifying. Every time I ask a question, I get a very different answer. And I find that quite frustrating because I'm one of those people that just really wants to know.

I'm not here to trip anyone up. I just want to know. So it's very simple.

I can talk about it very easily from the Tesla perspective, right? I lease a car on salary sacrifice. They know who I am.

They've got my bank details. Simple as that. So every time I plug my car in, there's a little handshake between the car and the charger, and the amount of energy that I've used is costed bills straight to me.

Simple as that. Where I think it gets complicated is when you're in an environment where you've got one vehicle, but with different drivers. So if you've got a fleet of vehicles, and on that day, a different driver gets in, you need to understand what cost center that bill's due to go to, or the individual person, perhaps it was a hire car or something.

here. I mean, it was back in: 2017

But it's about the certification, and again, the compliance. So how do we identify who that driver is? How do we then process and exchange that sensitive, what we call toxic, financial information about them?

And I just think that might be the gray area. I feel like we need to speak directly to the OEMs, the manufacturers of both the Charter and the vehicle to find out what's stopping them. Then I'm starting to get a little skeptical.

Like, is it because it's actually a really cheap and affordable, brilliant way of doing it? And actually there's more promised revenue to be generated down the other routes. I just don't know the answers.

And this is why I love coming on these podcasts because it gets us all talking and thinking that is what it's all about. In fact, I don't even like listening to those podcasts where people pretend to know everything because that's not progressive. So actually, call to action.

If anybody would like to talk Gary and I through why parking lot hasn't happened more quickly, then that would be great because both Gary and I know that it is possible and it is happening, but in very small numbers. Why?

Gary: I want to finish up here by talking about roaming.

I said before on the show that I love roaming apps, Zapmap, Season and Episode Sponsors, have ZapPay. And I know that you use that a lot, Sarah. And there are many others out there on the market.

Now I have no problem with that, but, and I've also said this before on the show, I don't really care which roaming solution you use. Whichever one you use should allow you to access all the charges at all times. So far, there isn't one roaming solution that does that.

There are commonalities with many of them, but there are also ones that are unique to one charge point operator. InstaVault, for example, only roams with Octopus Electroverse. As far as I know, if you're not a fleet user, GridServe are not yet partnered for anybody with roaming.

Why is this?

Sara: Well, again, my understanding of this is that it does boil down to your agreement. So there are different types of roaming.

There's ones where you as a driver can obviously, in fact, let's break down. If you're a driver, you just want to use any charger anywhere and that's just what you want to do. And it might not surprise you that I've been told many times contactless payment is roaming.

Now we know that not to be true because there isn't contactless payment on a lot of the AC devices out there. I wish there was, especially when you can have just one that powers all of the chargers that you see, that would be a fantastic opportunity. But no, I do not believe that contactless is roaming.

Now the charge point operators make agreements with each other about, say you had a card that had charge point operator A, and you wanted to use that very same card in a completely competing company B, they may not have agreed to that. So it might be that they haven't got the rates defined, but in some cases they want the opposite of that. They want the footfall on their charges.

So they'll be inviting full roaming, but we know that it will go that way. If we're going to learn anything from our European counterparts, roaming is absolutely everything. It creates loyalty.

There are endless studies that say charge point operator utilization goes up by 25, 30% when you open to roaming. So even if you're taking a tiny slice of that pie, then it's been worth it. Even if you have to open up to a sort of competitor card coming to your site, it's still a driver with cash in their pocket to use on your charger.

So I believe in roaming. I think it's a fantastic thing. I said earlier, I only have a couple of apps.

I'm very loyal to a couple of those apps. And I tend to, as they vote with my wheels, I go where I think it's easy for me to find, locate, receive a charge and pay for a charge. That's all I want to do.

Sara: So we've got a few key takeaways from our discussion today. As Sarah mentioned several times there, one primary block for payments is agreements. These govern things like preauthorizations, roaming and plug and charge.

blic charge point regulations: 2023

blic charge point regulations: 2023

We know what the problems are and the pay-through payment anxiety report is looking to specify the key ones so they can be actioned. But nobody's really sort of taking a hold of this and providing key leadership to make sure that we can get all this in place as quickly as possible. Now, I recommend a read of the report.

It's not all deep and intellectual. It's got lots of input from key members of the EV world, including three who have appeared on this podcast, myself included, but don't let that put you off. The report is linked in the notes.

At this season, we're looking at raising the awareness of carbon literacy with our listeners. And one way we're doing that is with a carbon fact as read by carbon literacy trainer, Anne Snelson.

Anne: If you're wanting to save emissions in your home, just think about all the things that heat up.

Showers, heaters, cookers, kettles, and tumble dryers all use significant amounts of energy. Reduce your use of these and you'll be saving kilowatt hours.

Gary: It's time for a cool EV or renewable thing to share with you listeners.

residents from the summer of: 2025

Since it's a collective self-consumption project, residents are paying five euros to buy in. However, the cemetery is a private property The cemetery's solar canopy will equitably share the electricity produced with all consumers. It's also supported by the Fondation de France, a government agency that fosters the growth of private philanthropy and private foundations.

We love this, but no doubt there will be complaints from some nimbits about the panels keeping the sun off the gravestones and not allowing them to weather appropriately. I hope you enjoyed listening to today's show. It was put together this week with the help of Sarah Sloman, Melanie Shufflebottom, Paul Grosvenor, and Daniel Barnes.

Many thanks to all for their time and help. If you have any thoughts, comments, criticisms, or other general messages to pass on to me, I can be reached at info at efemusings. com.

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Thanks as always to my co-founder Simon. You know, he's just back from his family holiday in Greece. Lots of time spent on the electric unicycle hacking along the mountain roads near the seaside resort he was in.

The only trouble was he sapped his range and he ended up having to call for a taxi to get him back to the hotel. And they're not cheap, Greek taxis. He's hoping things will be a bit cheaper if he goes to Ibiza instead next time, especially the taxis.

Sara: I really do hope that we will see a significant reduction in that price.

Gary: Thanks for listening. Bye.