But why oh why can’t you just put a credit card in a slot and punch in your pin, then plug the cable into your car? Why do you have to belong to some secret society or another?
Because our government has only advised the charge station companies that they should take credit/debit cards for these transactions rather than demanding it, & only for rapid chargers, not the 7kW AC posts.
Some companies have retrofitted their rapid chargers but not all.
But there’s another problem, to be able to take credit/debit cards these machines require a comms connection, and some chargers are in places where the comms connections don’t work very well, such as the west coast of Scotland. The machines can however record a transaction with an RFID card using its internal database that gets updated “frequently” & store it for later retrieval.
Worse than that though, some chargers cease working if they lose a comms signal.
And then other give a free vend if they lose a comms signal.
It’s a mess