News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:The US Is Real Close to Screwing Up Electric Vehicle Char... by unethical_ban on Tuesday March 30, 2021 @02:18PM (#26638225)
There should be a standard port and process for charging vehicles required, and companies can make additional, proprietary ports and charging capabilities in parallel if they want.

It is a great benefit to society that our transport recharging (gas dispensers) are standard in design, so that any company can operate a dispenser of any vendor into a car of any design.

The same should exist for EV - but if the "least common denominator" becomes obsolete, allow vendors to provide a secondary (or tertiary) mechanism to charge. Yes, this increases initial production cost. Yes, it is worth it for the benefits gained to open infrastructure.

Re:The US Is Real Close to Screwing Up Electric Vehicle Char... by WorldMaker on Tuesday March 30, 2021 @07:21PM (#26641770)
From the opposite perspective, there shouldn't be so much "innovation" in plug design. We've known the basics of plug design for more than a century: you need a positive wire, a negative wire, a ground, and you need to agree on AC versus DC and current/frequency. Why do we need all of these additional "proprietary ports" and "charging capabilities"?

We can pretty much stop at CCS for all that it currently matters. CCS supports a software protocol for negotiating AC/DC/current/frequency and a wider variety of options than are currently practical in most states. CCS is like a super-over-designed-by-committee USB-B+. (It's not quite USB-C because it is definitely not symmetrical and insertable in any orientation; it's backwards compatibility with "USB-A" level two ports alone insures that.)

CCS supports "Plug and Charge" as a protocol handshake, and that's really indicative of the actual fight happening in "plug" designs for cars and the proprietary network: Apple Pay (Tesla Supercharger and what CCS could be if networks support it) versus your Old Fashioned Credit Card Swipe machine. Everyone is fighting to get more of those Credit Card fees and letting the ideal (plug in and the car knows how to bill everything) get in the way of the practical (credit card swipes have mostly worked for gas pumps for decades). It's a very dumb fight that is getting in the way of practical adoption.

Re:The US Is Real Close to Screwing Up Electric Vehicle Char... by imtringued on Wednesday March 31, 2021 @05:12AM (#26645046)
You want the car to authenticate itself. Instead of installing dozens of different apps on your smartphone you want to just plug the charger into the car and then just confirm whether you agree to the fees or not. The owners of the charger just want to get paid so the payment can be done through a dedicated payment provider like Apple Pay, Visa, whose app you install. It's not any meaningfully different than a gas station. Nobody cares, you pay by cash, credit card or apple pay and get on with your life.
Re:The US Is Real Close to Screwing Up Electric Vehicle Char... by WorldMaker on Wednesday March 31, 2021 @10:57AM (#26648128)
Yes, that's the ideal, the practical issue in the fight is still the "gatekeeping" behind "plug and charge" and who can do that, instead of just being "anyone with a valid credit card".