Why do you need an app to charge your electric car?

I read an article somewhere—I can no longer find the link that inspired this note—that said that you need an app in order to charge your electric car to make sure you pay for the electricity. If you don’t have cell service or wireless, then you can’t charge. The author was somewhere in Tennessee—I believe outside Knoxville, near the Smokies—where there was no reception. He couldn’t charge his vehicle with the standard chargers. The article went on to explain how to use the emergency kit to charge from an industrial plug instead.[1]

It got me thinking that (A) there really is an app for everything these days and (B) that this is really a solution that only a hyper-libertarian, pay-as-you-go, services-are-businesses-that-must-generate-profit mindset can birth as not only the best solution, but the only feasible solution.

Not every service is a business. Not every service must create profit. Services, by their very definition, are infrastructure that help society generate value. Clean water, education, electricity grids, cell and data grids, and so on. If there’s a well in the middle of town, how much sense does it make to only use that well if it can generate a profit? Of course, you regulate use to avoid overuse and abuse. We’ve just become so accustomed that metering by “who can afford it” is the only possible way of implementing such a system. We knee-jerk solve every problem with markets and money.

How about a service for charging cars where you pay in a certain amount—say $500/year—as a subscription to just be able to use charging anywhere? Or what about if your car kept track of what it was charging and just reported it later? When you synced the app, you would get charged? Is there no room for trust in the system? Like, couldn’t you just tank up on credit, then pay it off later? I can think of a dozen ways to cheat a system like this, but I can also think of a dozen ways to prevent cheating. This should be doable.

But it probably didn’t even occur to the designers of the system because there are intrinsic requirements that they’re not even aware of.

Every requirement limits the size of the solution set.

We should be aware of and honest about systemic requirements (imposed from without, by definition). We should be honest about which of these requirements benefit which stakeholders.

Here are some questions we should ask before designing a nationwide system like this:

• Is the complexity engendered by a requirement worth the effort?
• Do the advantages outweigh the drawbacks?
• For which stakeholders?
• If we ignored or decreased the importance of certain stakeholders, would that improve the benefit to others?
• Would it reduce complexity?

We actually do this all the time, but usually grant outsize weight to a group of stakeholders who aren’t directly involved with either developing or using a product. This tenet is almost never considered or acknowledged, because it has become so intrinsic and unquestioned: The first and foremost goal of a solution is to make money for investors.

Only when that condition has been guaranteed, can we consider value to a product’s or service’s users. After that—if there any wiggle room left—do we consider how the product is useful or detrimental to society. Lastly—and this is a long shot—we consider how it could be good or, at worst, neutral for the environment.

So the stakeholders for any product or service, in decreasing order of importance are,

Once the first is satisfied, then the others don’t matter anymore. Everybody goes home to their infinity pools overlooking glowing city lights. If the profit outweighs the fines, then it will be done, regardless of the neglect to all other stakeholders.

It’s a shitty way of running things. We should allow ourselves the luxury of having a bit more imagination.