Correct. The Ohme works a bit differently to a standard charging point in that it talks to the car in the same way that a rapid charger does.
Not so. the standard AC pilot signal can't do that. CCS, Chademo, GB-T and Tesla proprietary supercharger use different methods to communicate between the vehicle and charge point.
Chademo and GB-T use CAN bus, CCS and Tesla use variants of Powerline networking. None of these
require the Internet to be connected anywhere.
The Ohme works by connecting to your car manufacturer's internet-facing API, which in turn will try to communicate via cellular data to your car, to wake it up, and report back on the state of charge. This clearly means that both the Ohme unit, and your car need to have Internet connectivity at the same time, and it also means that the OHME smart charging functionality that this works with cannot work sensibly if you have multiple vehicles, or multiple Ohme chargers, because the signalling goes over the Internet.
From the Ohme website: 'Some car manufacturers provide an API (Application Programming Interface) which allows access to information about your car via your manufacturer’s smartphone app.'
There is the new Plug & Charge protocols, which can use CCS-like signalling for negotiating AC charging, but at present very few cars actually support it (VAG MEB platform is one), and you'd need the support from both the charge point and the vehicle, but at least that way, you could tell which one of your possibly compatible cars is physically connected to which one of your compatible charge points at potentially different locations. This would increase the complexity of a standard home charger by requiring something akin to a powerline modem in there, as well as running a full IP protocol stack on that interface (in addition to any local, or 'cloudy' networking it does). This therefore increases the price point of the charge point.
