The big feature of the car example comes within the third paragraph. It's decentralized. The node, the charging station, doesn't need to phone home or synchronize with a central authority in order to process the payment. It can write and fulfill the contract.

It may be the case that the fundamental, key, killer features of the blockchain have lost their initial lustre to many people, and I understand that. But decentralization and verifiable, consistent truth are a really, really big deal.

There are applications with promise, large promise. Killer apps? Maybe. They will arrive, it's more "which of these" and not "whether these":

* https://ambrosus.com:

"At the Ambrosus project we aim to radically improve the global supply chains by creating a trusted ecosystem where we can reliably record the entire history of products and execute commercial transactions accordingly."

* http://www.augur.net:

Prediction markets -- fascinating stuff with major potential.

* https://qz.com/1163660/brazil-may-write-new-laws-based-on-da...

Brazil experimenting with laws/petitions on the blockchain

... There are many amazing use-cases.

The reason this YC article was published is because there is a great demand for blockchain from investors.

Ignore it or doubt it at your own peril!

sorry but rather phoning home to verify entitlement, it will now have to sync the WHOLE blockchain (probably ASYNC but still). You're mixing two similar problem, and brute forcing things is not going to work for things like topping up a car.

Why is it worse to phone home and synchronize with a central authority than to phone home and synchronize with a blockchain?

When authority is centralized, it's akin to full control. Decentralization fragments control across many, many different parties, who in consensus have authority.

If the transaction is on an immutable public record, the authority couldn't say: "Well, no you didn't pay us. Pay us again, or we'll steal your dog."

If you live somewhere where Government/Corporation are out of control, this sort of safe guard has major benefit.

There's no safeguard here. The smart contract is a red herring. Smart contracts cannot see or alter the real world, they have to trust that someone does that for them. In the example of the charging station, there's no safeguard that proves that the charging station will charge my car once I have deposited cash. You can analyse all the lines of the smart contract and the workings of the blockchain, but it is wasted effort: I have no way to know whether or not the charging station will ignore the blockchain's state.

I feel this is grasping at straws. If I'm running a series of charging stations, then I absolutely do want full control. And if I'm the customer, I can simply call Visa or MasterCard if the owner tries that shit.

Have you come across https://www.provenance.org? It's outside the currency/wire transfer space. Looked like an interesting application to me, but possibly too nascent to be a shining example