Problems Charging Networks

[MachTri]

It's not always convenient for me to charge at home and I've been charging at work for months. There are several chargers (Level 2 EVSEs) installed at the office parking lot and usually more than one is available, but they are well used.
Today, I swiped my SemaConnect RFID card to charge my MME and the EVSC blinked red. The LCD display on this particular charger is broken so I unplugged and drove over to another charger. This one had a working LCD, and I could see it said "no account balance".
I think all the Charging networks do it this way. You have to put your CC in and they hold a balance (usually $20). The CC I had on the account had expired. There are lots of problems with this whole approach to billing.

1. You have to set this up in advance. If I decide to visit another area that has a different charging network I have to sign up for that network and put $20 on that account. This usually involves visiting a website, creating a username and password, verifying your email, typing in your CC info. All while you are supposed to be heading into a meeting or something more important.
2. You end up with various amounts of money spread across several charge networks. I very rarely use Blink but I have an account on there, for example. Are they still offering public chargers, even? Plus when I go to use one of these, there is a good chance that the CC I put on that account to "auto replenish" is now expired and will have to enter it again later.
3. You end up with multiple apps on our phone for each network.
4. You end up with a pile of RFID cards and have to remember to grab the right one for the right network charger.
5. The apps for these are buggy, unreliable and probably insecure. Most of the time the "available" option for the ChargePoint for Level 2 charges is not accurate. You can' t use the ChargePoint App to charge sometimes and have to use the RFID card. When I tried to use the SemaConnect App to login and fix my CC situation it just got the spinny ball. When I called their tech support they told me their "app is broken" and to use their website on a computer. Unacceptable.

Can we get these guys to get their act together by some sort of incentive through the Infrastructure bill? This is what I'd like to see.

1. Plug and charge should work 100% every time at every public charger.
2. It's probably not practice to have CC charges for small amounts. The car manufactures should hold the balance and deal with the CC company. The charging networks would just charge them. Like they try to do with EA.
3. Car manufactures open their Plug and Charge API so that you don't have to rely on the Car Manufacture to do the payment for #2. 3rd party companies like PayPal, CC companies or whatever could do it. You should be able to have multiple cars from different manufactures on the same account this way.

Three simple steps that would streamline the whole thing for users and the Public Charging networks. This would go a long way to speed EV adoption.

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