Fixing the payments thing has been addressed by the EU as far as I know: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_...

Unfortunately, only partially [1]:

- card acceptance is only required for 50 kW+ chargers. All the relatively low power chargers at supermarkets, shopping malls and other public venues? They can get by with offering QR codes that are all too often abused for phishing campaigns [2][3] and still have the issue with requiring some sort of app.

- the "card acceptance" may also be fulfilled by PSD2 compliant mobile banking apps, so if you got a rooted phone (where Google Pay is a cat-and-mouse game), a phone whose vendor is under sanctions and thus doesn't get the Google ecosystem or don't want to involve Google Pay, Apple Pay, PayPal or the likes in your daily life, you're screwed just as well at these charger points

On top of that, the standard to publish pricing information to the public coordination exchange is a hot XML/SOAP mess [4].

[1] https://nationale-leitstelle.de/ladeinfrastruktur-im-eu-kont...

[2] https://www.adac.de/news/verkehr-quishing-parkautomaten/

[3] https://www.adac.de/news/auto-quishing-betrug-ladesaeule/

[4] https://nationale-leitstelle.de/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/M...

I was too optimistic about card payments when I went on vacation with my electric car in EU this summer. In some countries it worked perfectly but in other countries I had to scan a QR code, which usually ended up in an "sorry, there was an error" page. When I eventually started using a charging network the rest of the vacation was great.