There’s no hiding it – it’s a bit of a mess when it comes to charging electric vehicles in Australia, with the majority of of charging networks requiring you to download their app from the App Store or Google Play, create an account with all of your personal information, and adding a payment method – meh!
However, most EV Charging networks (including AGL, bp pulse, Chargefox, Evie and Exploren), also support using RFID cards as an alternative to using apps, contactless payments or AutoCharge – with the benefit that they work ‘offline’ (no need for phone reception) and can easily be kept in your wallet or car for when you need to use them.
While most networks will happily sell you an RFID card for a few dollars (eg, Evie charges $5) for theirs, you can get away with just one card – in each of the apps that support RFID cards, you can enter the card number (or ‘UID’), which you’ll find on either the front or back of the card, depending on where you got it from.
But it turns out – you can use a lot of other different cards as well as an alternative to RFID cards from the networks.
While it’s possible to use NFC reading apps on Android and perhaps iPhone to try and pull out this card number for use, it’s not exactly straight forward to find the right number.
It turns out that the Everty Driver app has a neat feature – not only can you type in the card number manually, but you can also use your phone to scan for compatible tags.
Just open the Everty Driver (and yes, it’s another app and account you’ll need to create and sign up for) app, and under ‘Account’ > ‘RFID Cards’ > ‘+’, you’ll see where to add/scan cards here.
All sorts of tags/cards are compatible it turns out – after picking up whatever I had handy, it turns out lots of public transport cards work (like Canberra’s MyWay+ card, Sydney’s Opal card, Adelaide’s MetroCard, Auckland’s AT Hop card) along with some other random cards – eg I still had one of the original ‘Gloria Jeans Coffee eSipper‘ cards, which works fine – as does the Up High cloud keychain I got from Up!
Once you’re done, you can copy the UID into other apps before you hit the ‘+’ button in the Everty, like Chargefox, Evie, etc and use that card in the other apps.
And yes, the app will give you an error if you try and scan an incompatible card – like a payment card (and sadly my old Chargepoint card doesn’t work)
So enjoy this trick – you might find that you’ve already got something handy to use when charging instead of having to purchase another card, or know you can use the same card on multiple networks if you didn’t know! 🙂