this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2026
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Electric Vehicles
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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.
This shit is the worst. I've stood on fucking empty dark parking lots, in the middle of freezing winter storms, with screaming kids in the car, for what feels like hours setting up absurdly complicated apps, that require so much bullshit information, only to find at the end of it that the charger didn't work anyway.
This experience alone is enough for me to actually discourage a lot of people from buying an EV. These providers need to get their shit together, it's absolutely horrible user experience.
In the 5 years I've owned an EV, things have gotten better, but the fact that this is still a common experience means that infrastructure just is not ready.
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.