[Paul_Moxhay]

EDIT:
POLAR have now changed their charging structure and are moving towards a PAYG model so please read this thread with that in mind

People will charge their Ampera away from home much less often than a Nissan Leaf owner but you will occasionally want to do it.

However, all charging stations are not the same. Some are free to use, provided free to customers of the establishment such as hotels, B&Bs etc. These are great when statying away from home as you can often travel to your destination and then potter about locally in electric mode.

Of course, if you visiting friends or family just plug in to the 13A socket but be careful to us 6A rather than 10A if it is an old socket or circuit.

Most charging in the UK right now requires some kind of membership. I hate these. You have to join the scheme in advance, usually with some monthy or yearly commitment, and then you get a card or tag. This has a chip inside that allows you to open the flap on the charging station to charge up. No card... no charge!

The whole idea of a membership like this is rediculous. You have to pay for charging you don't know you will need in advance and it is often quite a heafty fee... POLAR for instance wants £29.50 per month plus 95p per charge. Now, given that the Ampera can only charge to about 11KWh and given it can only charge at the rate of 16A max (10A if using the supplied cable), you won't get much per charge. It is an exhorbident cost just to get access to charging.

I don't join a club and pay in advance for my petrol, why should it be any different for electricity?

Please, I urge you all, do not sign up to POLAR or any other charging membership scheme without giving it very careful thought. It could cost you a fortune.

PS POLAR seems the worst but there are many of them cropping up all over the country. It seems that almost every town is getting its own scheme requiring a membership fee and a card. It is simply rediculous and unsustainable.

 

[Paul_Moxhay]

Oh, what a surprise, everyone already has a suitable smartcard usually with a Visa or Mastercard symbol printed on it so there's already a payment infrastructure as well. Is there any reason at all why public charging points couldn't just have a credit card reader? Slightly less pervasive but even better would be if they used paywave (or equivalent): the existing RFID readers could probably be reprogrammed for that if they didn't want to take payment.

Duncan, you have spotted it... the elephant in the room... the charge companies seem to have ignored the obvious. Credit card readers are the way to go and the only reason I can imagine that they didn't go down that route in the first place is that the charging stations were not available with credit card processing capability. That might have been an excuse I suppose but now that tech is available and so now there is no excuse.

This isn't rocket science: the other week I stayed in an hotel where the room safe used credit cards: not for the money side, it just read them for identity to lock/unlock.

Perfect... this is the kind of lateral thinking that is needed in the EV charging world.

There was a government project (Common Whitelist Project) to harmonise all the different schemes into a single one but it was never going to work as it was too complex and had too much lag. It got shelved at detailed proposal stage. We don't need more complicated systems to handle the complicated systems we shouldn't have had in the first place. Keep it simple and don't re-invent the wheel.

Membership schemes will fail because no one will pay the rediculous prices for membership nor do we want the hassle of pre-registration.