That was my experience renting an EV for a month in Sweden a few months ago. Charging stations everywhere, but 1/4 of them wouldn’t accept my payment methods (US and Swedish credit cards), 1/4 were too slow to be worthwhile and 1/4 didn’t work at all. Most of them required me to install an app on my phone to input my credit card details (really stupid). There were many times I needed to charge in an unfamiliar town and I had to try three charging stations before I found one that worked for me. Loved driving that car but I hated charging it.
According to EU laws since 2024 every charger above 47kW/h has to accept card payment. This is being slowly rolled out. I know that Spain now offers financing for charging station operators to do the necessary changes. I already saw some stations modified to accept credit card. They also rolled out public website with a map of charging stations which is also a big improvement. It’s slowly moving in the right direction and EU definitely has a good idea about how it should work. That’s why I’m still split. I will see what happens this year.
I have an idea to start scraping public data bout charger availability and provide some stats. Which operators are the least reliable, how long does it take to fix a charger on average, which chargers are broken most often and so on. This data in EU is public so it shouldn’t be that hard, I just have to finish another project first.
That was my experience renting an EV for a month in Sweden a few months ago. Charging stations everywhere, but 1/4 of them wouldn’t accept my payment methods (US and Swedish credit cards), 1/4 were too slow to be worthwhile and 1/4 didn’t work at all. Most of them required me to install an app on my phone to input my credit card details (really stupid). There were many times I needed to charge in an unfamiliar town and I had to try three charging stations before I found one that worked for me. Loved driving that car but I hated charging it.
needing an app on your phone to do anything should be illegal. it should be optional but all meters should take cash or e payments w/o a phone
According to EU laws since 2024 every charger above 47kW/h has to accept card payment. This is being slowly rolled out. I know that Spain now offers financing for charging station operators to do the necessary changes. I already saw some stations modified to accept credit card. They also rolled out public website with a map of charging stations which is also a big improvement. It’s slowly moving in the right direction and EU definitely has a good idea about how it should work. That’s why I’m still split. I will see what happens this year.
that’s good news.
I have an idea to start scraping public data bout charger availability and provide some stats. Which operators are the least reliable, how long does it take to fix a charger on average, which chargers are broken most often and so on. This data in EU is public so it shouldn’t be that hard, I just have to finish another project first.