Mobile Payments for EV Charging

Challenge

Electric vehicles (EVs) are quickly gaining momentum with development in the US in the forefront and Europe following closely behind. Building the full infrastructure for charging them is, however, expensive, and initial investments are not likely to pay back in the near future. Moreover, public funding is not sufficient to fully solve the issue either. Furthermore, the consumers face the task of locating rare EV charging locations and paying for the service. Thus, the challenge is to come up with a solution that will enable quick and large scale installation of EV charging station bases as well as provide EV drivers with a convenient method for paying for charging while sparing excessive capital expenditures and higher costs.

Solution

ChargeNOW! by ParkNOW! is a full end-to-end solution for finding the closest available EV charging station, reserving charging time, and paying for the service. It works as follows: The driver uses a smart phone or a GPS device to look for and possibly reserve the closest available EV charger. He arrives at an available charger and opens his smartphone app. The scanning identifies the location, and only the desired length of the charging session needs to be added manually. The driver's selected payment source will be debited according to applicable rates, and a message will be sent to the smartphone with a one-time-use-only activation code. Once parking at the reserved charger, the driver enters the received activation code into the keypad and starts charging. In case of networked chargers no keypads nor activation codes are needed.

Economic Impact

Parking operators and free parking area owners can start offering EV charging services very fast and with limited investments as no physical payment infrastructure or hardware is needed. Drivers will be able to easily find an available charging location and reserve it online over mobile Internet. Payments are all cashless, making the whole process incredibly convenient, therein positively contributing to increasing EV popularity and environment friendlier driving.

Visit us at the Intertraffic and at CEVVITS in Amsterdam 2012!

Mr. Carlos Lopes
carlos.lopes@nowinnovations.com
http://www.goparknow.com/

ParkNOW! EV Charging. pdf

ChargeNOW! works with both networked and non-networked charging stations. ChargeNOW! has been available in the US market since 2011 and will launch in Europe this year. It was also recently chosen by ABB as the payment system of choice for the world's largest fast charging installation and first-ever nationwide network to be set up in Estonia 2012-2013.