World’s First Electric Vehicle Charging Station to Accept IOTA Payments Inches Closer to a Reality

Following a series of extensive tests spanning five months, the world’s first-ever IOTA-powered charging station for electric vehicles (EVs) is finally preparing for a much-anticipated debut. The update on the latest round of tests was posted on the official INVADE website on Sep 11, 2018, underlining that the world’s first cloud-based flexibility management systems integrated with EVs and battery storages.

All Payments Through IOTA, no Credit Card Required

Granted, the project still requires some further polishing for that extra reliability and flexibility the folks over at ElaadNL are aiming for, but at this juncture, it’s only a matter of “when,” not a matter of “if.”

One of the many perks of this forthcoming facility is that customers won’t have to fumble for their credit or debit cards while checking out and neither will they be asked to furnish a charge or subscription card. These state-of-the-art charging stations by ElaadNL accepts IOTA (MIOTA) payments, meaning the process is quick, efficient, and less vulnerable to technical or transactional errors.

Harm van den Brink, IT Architect, Smart Grids & Distributed Ledger Technology expert at ElaadNL, said:

“No back office and no communication protocol are required to operate the charging station; the transactions are exchanged directly without the use of a charge card or subscription.”

Brink also assured that the charge station had undergone multiple tests with a “mini-Tesla” the company built. The company is now focusing on developing a QR-code display that enables users to pay and charge from the charging station directly.

Waiting on Support for Other Vehicles

In its present form, the ElaadNL EV charging station includes a charging island, a fast charger, a battery, a pair of charging lanterns, and of course, the IOTA charger.

However, the charging station is not yet equipped with an appropriate hardware configuration to support regular cars. Brink acknowledged that despite all the progress, the company still considers the software/hardware combo powering the charging station not fully ready for upscaling. To quote the IT Architect and blockchain technology expert:

“We are very pleased to see that this can work, even in a real machine-to-machine way. However, the software/hardware is still very experimental, and thus not ready for upscaling – in my opinion.”

Now that the initial tests are through, the next step will involve ElaadNL integrating the charger into an IOTA-based smart network capable of distributing information among the right nodes. For example, the system, when fully ready, will be able to automatically pass on the data about a transformer’s capacity load to the charging station (or for that matter, any hardware that requires similar machine-to-machine communication.)

Additionally, the device will also be programmed to transmit their energy-usage logs to the Tangle.

Brink said that the transformer would have the ability to request other connected devices to initiate smart charging. If the request is approved, “they will get incentivized directly by sending them IOTA tokens,” he added. According to Brink, the test results for these features should come out by the end of 2018.