Hello! Sorry to hear you had a bad experience. As someone whose worked for back offices and Charge Point manufacturers for a number of years I'm happy to give you a bit of info on my experience...

So contactless is only really arriving now for two reasons.

First off the practicalities; installing a contactless payment reader is hard. You CANNOT use the existing RFID reader and so need a new piece of hardware fitted; costing anywhere between £250-500 per reader and in a market where a lot of tenders for new equipment are weighted on price, these are often removed from quotes. Especially on AC equipment. £250-500 can be an additional 30% added to the price of a charger.

Also, just plugging in a contactless reader doesn't do anything. It needs to be integrated with the brains of the charger and it needs to work with a tariff engine; there are, as yet, no standards for this in the Charger world so each manufacturer is basically starting afresh. Each reader (as in make and model) needs to be connected to a PSP and then to an Acquiring bank. It needs to be certified over each step of the process and this can also take a lot of time and money to achieve. Usually each contactless reader also needs it's own dedicated, encrypted connection which means another LAN connection, modem, server etc... Not the end of the world but again, additional cost at point of install.

Secondly, cost to run. Our company also runs parking pay and display devices for hundreds of locations and we run maybe close to a million transactions a week. As such PSPs are falling over themselves to get that business with regular churn, often at high rates and to get the business, their prices are low. EV charging is different, it's not used as much and the average cost of a Charge is £5-7 for a Rapid. It's not particularly enticing so PSP and Acquirer fees are higher. Dependant on the card you use it could cost anything up to 30p (Amex/Diners Card etc....) just to run off your transaction.

If you look at the network you mentioned, why on earth would they go through all this to set it up when they can get £8 a month from you regardless? Their model is like the RAC, who cares if you use the service as long as you pay them.

I understand everyone wants it right now and we are all working on it (we've just launched our first rapids with contactless) and as a driver myself I love the convenience too but I just wanted to flag the work that goes in under the hood. I get the impression people think we're out to make things deliberately complicated when really we're not. Honestly .

 

We recently charged at a newly installed Alfa Power charge point and it took the downloading of an app, registration of a bank card and two phone calls before we could charge our car. It seemed crazy that we were having to jump through these hoops whilst at a Shell garage, especially given the widespread availability of pay at the pump for petrol & diesel. It must have cost the Alfa Power more to deal with us over the phone than we paid to charge the car.

Have you ever set up a company and payment infrastructure?

The number of card payments in a day from each machine must have an impact, chargers are very low volume, pay at pump much higher volume and associated with the local garage billing.

There is very limited profit margin in car charging from my understanding. Utilisation is low, charging at Instavolt in Rotherham I have seen another car occasionally, but usually none when I arrive and I am there by myself. The website suggests 4 cars per day, so £30-50 trading a day. Not even as much as a single fuel transaction for many.

 

Why not partner with a service a motorist might typically use already, such as Ringo?

Imagine rocking up at a rapid charger with a large Ringo number on it, making payment with a couple of clicks as you already have a Ringo account, and your charge starts.

It's not much different from existing app based charging, other than there's a good chance you'll already have a Ringo account setup with associated cards attached, and doesn't require any additional hardware on the rapid charger.

It does however require working comms, which seems to be biggest problem for all the providers other than Tesla.

 

The whole point of contactless is to get away from apps. Ringo is yet another app. If you are going to decide on one app then it needs to be a reliable charging app. None of them have managed that yet. None.

Contactless should be mandated for rapids. The cost of contactless will come down as then all the networks will be using it.

Alfa power will also send you a tag so you can use that instead of wasting time with an app.

 

It seemed crazy that we were having to jump through these hoops whilst at a Shell garage,

Where a rapid is at a manned location (eg. a garage or a cafe), there ought to be a 'pay at till' option.

 

On the continent, 2 or 3 cards seem to be able to start most chargers.

I'm thinking particularly of the New Motion card and the like. It's a pity we need more than a couple of cards to make the whole network work, but I think that is how the continent have gone ??

The New Motion card, like most of the continental ones, do not require a subscription.

 

I suspect that a crucial difficulty with EV chargers compared to the many other things that have successfully implemented contactless is that the charger is using your card as a way of recognising who started the charge, and therefore only letting that same card end the charge and unlock the charge cable. That probably requires a lot more integration than simply taking money.

So long as that restriction on ending a charge is needed, I can see how having the provider's own card or app (which is then linked to any old easy means of taking the money) is the much easier way to do it.

So I suspect it would be much easier to implement contactless payment if we were happy to just pay a fixed fee up front, and allow the charge to end without proving your identity again. Could be fine if you stay with your car the whole time, but would create all kinds of problems for people who want to go for a toilet break or do something useful while the car charges. Although come to think of it, it would solve the problem of charger hogging!

 

I'm assuming engenie and shell have solved this issue or they assume owners won't be arses and stop other people's charges...

 

This topic has many previous threads, but I thank @Poot for explaining in more detail (and from first hand experience) what many of us have tried to explain.

Hopefully, in future we will see locations with (say) 20 destination AC chargers and a couple of payment machines that will take cards. Amortising the cost over those units makes it more viable.

In the short term, my hope is we see the government mandate network roaming, as allowed for in the recent legislation.

 

Thanks for the replies.

I wasn’t thinking that the chargepoint providers were just being awkward for the sake of it, I knew there would be reasons but wasn’t able to find a discussion on them when I searched the forum.

I understand that some of the latest Polar chargers accept contactless bank cards, do people know how they handle the ending charge situation? Can they recognise the same bank card or is it in combination with an app?

With regards to merchant acquirer fees, I know charges can be high but there are alternative providers that charge a small percentage of each transaction and no monthly fee, allowing those with low volumes to accept card payments. I would have though this option would be preferable to having to maintain an app and take payments via that (which also presumably attract an acquirer fee)?