A follow up to the previous post on #AFIR ad hoc payments, price information and QR codes for EV charging that triggered a bit of a debate (online and offline).

In fact, talking about QR codes got me targeted advertising – see an excerpt here. I doubted whether this was ironic, but it seems to be a serious model: instead of ringing the doorbell, this ‘solution’ is: take out your phone, open the camera app, scan the QR code, wait for a web page to load, select the person…

A simple action that takes a fraction of a second is replaced by several steps that can take as long as a minute. This opens up new possibilities for ‘ding dong ditch’: take a picture of the code once and then command someone to the door from the comfort of your armchair whenever you feel like channeling your inner 10-year-old. But is it useful?

Paying by QR code is becoming increasingly common in shops and restaurants in Belgium, for example – not to mention Asia. It has opened up cashless payment options in many more places (and in the case of Belgium, enables both bank payments and the popular meal vouchers). But back to charging points. In the previous post, I suggested payment terminals as a more user-friendly and easier-to-implement alternative to dynamic QR codes. A key advantage of paying with a debit card over QR code payments is pre-authorisation. Swipe your card, start a charging session and only pay for what you actually use (also an AFIR requirement, by the way). The current QR code payment from the European Payments Initiative, which has adopted the aforementioned Belgian QR code and the Dutch iDeal, does not offer this option. That’s fine for shops and restaurants: you order and pay the bill. But for EV charging, it means that a user has to choose at the start of the charging session – as historically at some petrol stations – how much they want to fill the car with. But: “Was will der Wagen?”

The user does not know this information. The car might – it is a data field in the 15118 communication. But that only makes QR code pre-payments an option along with 15118 in the specific use case where you don’t want to use the automatic authentication provided by the same standard. And you don’t leave earlier than planned.

This means that the only real option would be to still end up on a website via a QR code, where you use a credit card or perhaps SEPA debit mode to start charging. However, this would require you to enter your name and other details. So the question is, apart from protection against fake stickers leading to fraudulent sites, to what extent would this require a dynamic QR code?

So is the QR code for EV charging like the QR code for the doorbell? A solution that adds complexity when the task seems so simple: press the button and go..