I outsmarted myself the other day. The line at the Tesla Supercharger was only two or three cars deep, but none of the plugged-in vehicles looked to be in any hurry to leave. Across the lot were another company’s high-speed chargers that were newly outfitted with the NACS plug — meaning I should have been able to charge my Model 3 without even getting out an adapter.
I jumped out of line, zipped over to the empty stall, plugged in … and couldn’t get the charger to come to life. I had the phone app by Chargepoint, the third-party company that operates the charger. I had a credit card on file and money in my account on the app. But still, nothing. I couldn’t get the phone and the charger to talk to each other. Embittered by losing my place in line, I continued bitterly down the road toward the promise of open stalls at a different Supercharger a few miles away.
This is an all-too-common episode for America’s EV drivers. After the relief of finding an open charger comes the exasperation of finding the electricity won’t flow — the charging station won’t just shut up and take your money because of an inoperable touchscreen, a failure to pair with your phone, or a refusal to accept your credit card.
But, just maybe, 2025 will be the year the darkness begins to part. Next year, SAE International (formerly the Society of Automotive Engineers) will launch a “plug-and-charge” initiative alongside a variety of EV manufacturers and energy companies, together making up the Electric Vehicle Public Key Infrastructure group, which also has testing support from the Biden Joint Office of Energy and Transportation. Their goal: a universal protocol to pay for juice that would make charging seamless.
“Universal Plug & Charge levels up the electric fueling experience, making it even easier than filling up with gas,” Gabe Klein, Executive Director of the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, said in SAE’s news release. “We are rapidly approaching a future where every EV driver can just plug in, charge up, and go; the network will talk to your car and process the payment seamlessly.”
Plug-and-charge is the way Tesla’s Superchargers have always worked, which — along with the extent and reliability of that network — gave Tesla a huge leg up on its competition. Drivers have a credit card on file with the company; when they plug into a charger, it automatically recognizes the car and charges the card based on that plug’s cost per kilowatt-hour. Other EVs have managed to create this convenience for their owners, but it’s a trickier business for non-Tesla automakers who don’t control both the vehicles and the charging network, and therefore must work out deals and technology standards with the charging companies.
Those other charging networks have presented EV drivers with an experience that’s more like visiting a gas station, except worse. Some ask you to pair the charger with an app on your phone via Bluetooth. Even when the technology works, which it often doesn’t, this requires drivers to have already downloaded the app and created an account in advance, otherwise they’re fussing with their phones for minutes on end just to start charging.
Some feature the kind of touchscreen or button-powered display you might find when you pull up to a gas pump, which is fine when it works. But at a gas station, there’s typically a person inside a convenience store to help out if, say, your credit card won’t swipe correctly outside. EV charging stations, on the other hand, have popped up in parking garages or the lots around shopping malls, where there’s nary a soul to lend a hand if the charger won’t activate. For that reason and more, EV chargers need to just work.
The SAE-led initiative is part of a welcome maturation and streamlining that’s been coming to the EV industry. We’ve talked plenty about how nearly every automaker over the past couple of years has adopted the NACS plug that was formerly Tesla’s proprietary technology, leading EVs to consolidate toward uniformity rather than competing standards. A true industry-wide push for plug-and-charge would eliminate one of the major headaches and sources of anxiety for electrified drivers.
And it could do much more. To create universal plug-and-charge, vehicles would need public key-based authentication systems to identify themselves and securely verify that identity. With such a standard in place, EVs would be a big step closer to a future in which their owners can use the energy stored in vehicle batteries to do whatever they want.
For example, such keys could allow for the advent of widespread vehicle-to-grid integration, or V2G, where EVs can send energy from their batteries back onto the grid rather than just drawing power from it. In this way, EVs could be used to balance the grid and avoid blackouts, since any plugged-in EV could temporarily become a source of supply in times of crisis-level demand. (V2G also allows some people to engage in energy arbitrage, selling kilowatt-hours back onto the grid when prices are high.)
The potential wrench in the gears, especially considering the involvement of President Biden’s joint office, is the forthcoming second Trump presidency. Representatives of the mission say this effort is industry-led and -funded, however, and not reliant on federal support to survive. A better way to charge EVs is in the free market’s hands now.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to accurately reflect the involvement of the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation.
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