I'm now travelling with my Model S through Europe, and supercharging is great, but sometimes you want to get off the beaten track, and you get hit by the sillyness of different proprietary payment systems, like mobile apps, and RFID cards. I can accept that these systems exist, by that you can't pay by credit card at the charging stations as well is very annoying. They could even charge a lot extra for this, so I don't need to join their program and pay subscription fees, just to charge a couple of times when travelling through. I wouldn't have to order a special RFID card to a French address to fuel up at Total in France, or download an app for Shell in the Netherlands. I have written to the major Swedish providers (Fortum, Vattenfall, Clever) to question this, and have not got any real answers on why, just that they don't support it, and also to French Kiwhi (with no reply so far). I encourage others to write to their national providers and ask why they don't accept card payments, if you agree with this, so they see that there's a demand for card payments. I think they are more likely to give an answer if the question is asked in the local language.
Maybe they don't believe that people are actually travelling far with their electric cars, so they believe that only locals would be interested in their system (at least Kiwhi, France, and Ecotricity, UK, assume that you have a local address when registering)
The only operator I know of that accepts card payments directly at the charger is Latvian MMX Energy.
Maybe they don't believe that people are actually travelling far with their electric cars, so they believe that only locals would be interested in their system (at least Kiwhi, France, and Ecotricity, UK, assume that you have a local address when registering)
The only operator I know of that accepts card payments directly at the charger is Latvian MMX Energy.