Glossary

What is Plug and Charge (ISO 15118)?

Plug and Charge lets a vehicle authenticate and start a charging session automatically when plugged in, without an app or card, using ISO 15118.

Also known as: Plug & Charge, ISO 15118, PnC

Plug and Charge (PnC) is a capability defined by the ISO 15118 standard that lets a car and a charger authenticate each other automatically over the charging cable. The driver simply plugs in; billing and authorization happen behind the scenes with no app, RFID card or tap required.

PnC depends on both the vehicle and the EVSE supporting ISO 15118, plus a certificate exchange between the parties. Because support is uneven, whether a given station or EVSE supports plug-and-charge is a meaningful, queryable data attribute rather than a universal feature.

For products, PnC support is a differentiator worth surfacing: it materially improves the charging experience, and drivers increasingly filter for it. That makes it another example of a capability flag that only has value if it is captured accurately per EVSE.

In the Data for EV model

Data for EV exposes plug-and-charge as both a station-level supports_plug_and_charge flag and an EVSE capability (PLUG_AND_CHARGE), so products can filter for it reliably across networks.

See Plug and Charge (ISO 15118) in real data

Data for EV normalizes this across 65 networks into one canonical, OCPI 2.3.0-compatible model.