You’ve bought a shiny new electric car with Plug and Charge. The salesperson promised you’d never need to faff about with charging apps or RFID cards again. Just plug in, the car and charger shake hands digitally, and charging starts automatically. Payment happens in the background.
Except when you pull up to a motorway rapid charger, you’re still reaching for your phone. What’s gone wrong?
What Plug and Charge Actually Is
Plug and Charge (technically called ISO 15118, if you want to sound knowledgeable at dinner parties) lets your EV authenticate itself with a charger and authorise payment without any apps, cards, or button pressing. Think of it like contactless payment, but for your entire car. The technology has existed since around 2014, but implementation has been glacially slow.
When it works, it’s genuinely brilliant. You arrive at a compatible charger, plug in, and within seconds charging begins. The charger recognises your car’s digital certificate, checks you’re allowed to charge, and bills you automatically. No standing in the rain trying to get a charging app to load. No hunting through your wallet for the right RFID card.
The Reality in the UK Right Now
Here’s the frustrating bit: even in 2026, Plug and Charge is still the exception rather than the rule at UK public chargers. Tesla Superchargers have offered this seamlessly for years (albeit only for Teslas until recently), but the rest of the charging landscape remains a patchwork.
Among non-Tesla networks, Gridserve and Ionity have the most reliable Plug and Charge implementation at the time of writing. Some bp pulse and Shell Recharge locations support it. Osprey has been rolling it out gradually. But plenty of rapid chargers, even brand new installations, still don’t support the technology at all.
On the car side, it’s equally patchy. Many newer EVs from Mercedes, BMW, Porsche, Audi, Ford, and Polestar have Plug and Charge capability. The Hyundai Ioniq 5 and 6, and Kia EV6 and EV9, support it too. But you’ll often need to activate it through your car’s connected services first, which typically requires a subscription after an initial free period.
Why It’s Still Not Reliable
The problem isn’t usually the technology itself. It’s the execution. Charging networks need to implement ISO 15118 on their hardware and integrate it with their backend payment systems. Car manufacturers need to issue digital certificates and maintain the authentication infrastructure. Both sides need to test compatibility with each other, and there are dozens of combinations of car models and charging networks to validate.
Even when everything’s theoretically compatible, software bugs creep in. I’ve watched Plug and Charge work perfectly at a Gridserve charger one week, then fail at the identical charger the next week after an update. Certificate expiry issues crop up. Backend systems go offline. The charger recognises your car but the payment authorisation times out.
What Actually Happens When It Fails
In my experience, failed Plug and Charge attempts fall into three categories. Sometimes the charger simply doesn’t respond after you’ve plugged in, and you’re left staring at it for 30 seconds before accepting defeat. Other times you get an error on the charger screen saying authentication failed. Occasionally, and most annoyingly, it seems to work but charging never actually starts.
The workaround is always the same: fall back to the charging app or RFID card. This is why, despite owning a car with Plug and Charge, I still keep Zapmap, Octopus Electroverse, and Bonnet on my phone, and I’ve still got three RFID cards in my glovebox. The technology hasn’t eliminated the faff. It’s just added another step that sometimes works.
Should You Rely on It?
Treat Plug and Charge as a nice bonus when it works, not something to depend on. If you’re buying an EV and the dealer mentions it as a selling point, smile and nod, but still set up your charging apps before you take delivery.
For regular local charging, it matters less anyway. If you’re using the same Pod Point at your local Tesco every week, you’ll have the app set up and it becomes second nature. Plug and Charge would be transformative for occasional use at unfamiliar locations, the exact scenario where it’s most likely to let you down.
The genuinely useful application is at Tesla Superchargers if you’ve got a compatible non-Tesla EV. That actually works reliably, though you’ll need to set up payment details in the Tesla app first, which rather defeats the purpose of not needing apps.
What to Do Instead
My practical advice: use Octopus Electroverse or Bonnet if you want to minimise the number of apps cluttering your phone. Both give you access to multiple networks through a single app, and they often offer slight discounts on charging costs too. Keep one or two network-specific apps for your most-used chargers (Gridserve and Ionity apps are generally reliable).
Keep at least one RFID card as a backup. The Electroverse card is free and works across numerous networks. When your phone’s dead, or when an app update has broken something at exactly the wrong moment, you’ll be grateful for a piece of plastic.
Check your car’s settings to see if Plug and Charge is actually enabled. It’s sometimes buried in connectivity or charging menus, and it’s often disabled by default. Enable it, by all means, but don’t trust it.
The technology will get there eventually. Regulatory pressure is pushing networks to implement ISO 15118, and as more cars support it, the commercial incentive increases. But until reliability improves, Plug and Charge remains a solution to a problem we’re still solving the old-fashioned way: with apps, cards, and a resigned sigh.