to fill a gas car, generally you only need a credit card or cash. To charge an electric vehicle at a DC fast charging station, you need several things to work: a credit card reader, an app for that charger’s network, a working touch screen, and they’re all a little different.
That situation could change next year if a new “universal Plug and Charge” initiative of SAE International, a group of electric vehicle manufacturers and chargers, is advancing and gaining ground. The network, set to launch in early 2025, could make charging an electric vehicle actually easier than filling up with gas: plug it in, let the car and charger determine payment details over a cloud connection, and you’re done. .
Some car and charging network combinations already offer such a system through a patchwork of individual offers, such as listed in Inside EVs. Teslas have always offered a plug-and-charge experience, given the tight integration between their Superchargers and vehicles. Now Tesla will join the plug-and-charge movement itself, allowing Teslas to have a more or less similar experience at other stations.
The electric vehicle public key infrastructureor EVPKI, has a good number of the main players and is based on the ISO standard (15118) to make it faster and more secure to authenticate and authorize cars to charge at stations. There are a large number of certificates in each step of the upload process, as detailed in an EVPKI presentationand the system includes a certified Trust List. With an open standard and authentication system, there should be room for new charging networks and vehicle manufacturers.
Charging networks can and will likely continue to offer incentives for brand loyalty, whether through apps or rewards points. But new EV owners won’t have to work as hard to discover “the good ones” during road trips.
By connecting cars to key-based authentication systems, there is also the possibility that this initiative will also boost vehicle-to-grid (V2G) charging, in which cars’ huge batteries can be used to balance the regional power loads and make the grid more resilient.
“We are rapidly approaching a future where every electric vehicle driver can simply plug in, charge, and go; the network will communicate with their car and process payment seamlessly,” said Gabe Klein, executive director of the Joint Energy Office. and Transportation, said in a statement. “This is a critical step in the architecture to enable bi-directional charging and true vehicle-to-grid integration, the holy grail of energy and transportation.” The Joint Office is a collaboration between the Departments of Energy and Transportation.
The Hummer EV-sized elephant in the room is how the incoming Trump administration, with its stated opposition to the Biden administration’s EV policies, could impact this initiative. Klein told The Verge that, with acceptance and real work done by automakers and the industry, including Elon Musk-led Tesla, “the ship has sailed, so to speak.”
This story originally appeared. in Ars Technique.