ISO 15118 ''Road vehicles -- Vehicle to grid communication interface'' is a proposed international standard defining a

vehicle to grid Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) describes a system in which plug-in electric vehicles (PIEVs) sell demand response services to the electrical grid. Such services are either backfeeding electricity to the grid, or reducing the rate of charge from the grid ...

(V2G) communication interface for bi-directional charging/discharging of

electric vehicles An electric vehicle (EV) is a motor vehicle whose propulsion is powered fully or mostly by electricity. EVs encompass a wide range of transportation modes, including road vehicle, road and rail vehicles, electric boats and Submersible, submer ...

. The standard provides multiple use cases like secure communication, smart charging and the Plug & Charge feature used by some

electric vehicle network An electric vehicle charging network is an infrastructure system of charging stations to recharge electric vehicles. The term electric vehicle infrastructure (EVI) may refer to charging stations in general or the network of charging stations ...

Overview

ISO 15118 is one of the

International Electrotechnical Commission The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC; ) is an international standards organization that prepares and publishes international standards for all electrical, electronics, electronic and related technologies. IEC standards cover a va ...

's (IEC) group of standards for electric road vehicles and electric industrial trucks, and is the responsibility of Joint Working Group 1 (JWG1 V2G) of IEC Technical Committee 69 (TC69) together with subcommittee 31 (SC31) of the

International Organization for Standardization The International Organization for Standardization (ISO ; ; ) is an independent, non-governmental, international standard development organization composed of representatives from the national standards organizations of member countries. M ...

's (ISO) Technical Committee 22 (TC22) on road vehicles. ISO and IEC began working together on the standard in 2010, and a Plug & Charge section was released in 2014. No automakers had a productive implementation of the standard by 2018.

V2G-PKI

ISO 15118 communication can be secured by a TLS connection between EV and electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE). For the use case Plug&Charge this is even mandatory. The norm describes how a needed "V2G-PKI" (vehicle to grid -

Public Key Infrastructure A public key infrastructure (PKI) is a set of roles, policies, hardware, software and procedures needed to create, manage, distribute, use, store and revoke digital certificates and manage public-key encryption. The purpose of a PKI is to fac ...

) needs to be set up
Hubject
provided already in 2018 the first productive V2G-PKI and the related ecosystem for EU and US. The only productive

certificate authority In cryptography, a certificate authority or certification authority (CA) is an entity that stores, signs, and issues digital certificates. A digital certificate certifies the ownership of a public key by the named subject of the certificate. Thi ...

for a V2G-PKI is currently operated by Hubject. Several other companies declared work on a V2G-PKI solutions among which CharIn and Gireve. Nevertheless, charge station operators and automakers can also handle the certificates if they are based on the ISO15118 standard. and 2020, several

issues remained unsolved for using the standard as proposed.

Plug & Charge

The user-convenient and secure Plug & Charge feature envisioned with ISO 15118 enables an electric vehicle to automatically identify and authorize itself to a compatible

charging station A charging station, also known as a charge point, chargepoint, or electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE), is a power supply electrical device, device that supplies electrical power for recharging plug-in electric vehicles (including batter ...

on behalf of the driver, to receive energy for recharging its battery. The only action required by the driver is to plug the charging cable into the EV and/or charging station, because the car and the charger identify themselves to each other by exchanging certificates which were provided beforehand via a certificate pool to facilitate payment. An open test system was started in November 2021. The proposed standard can be used for both wired (AC and DC charging) and wireless charging for electric vehicles. Some EV cars support the Plug & Charge standard, including the model year 2021

Porsche Taycan The Porsche Taycan is a battery electric luxury sports sedan and shooting brake car produced by German automobile manufacturer Porsche. The concept version of the Taycan named the ''Porsche Mission E'', debuted at the 2015 Frankfurt Motor ...

Mercedes-Benz EQS The Mercedes-Benz EQS (V297) is a battery electric full-size luxury liftback car produced by German automobile manufacturer Mercedes-Benz Group.Mercedes-Benz It was released in September 2021 in Germany and the fourth quarter of 2021 in the Uni ...

Lucid Air The Lucid Air is a Battery electric vehicle, battery electric four-door luxury Sedan (automobile), sedan made by Lucid Motors. The car was announced in December 2016 and sold starting in 2021. The Dream Edition's United States Department of En ...

, and

Ford Mustang Mach-E The Ford Mustang Mach-E is a Battery electric vehicle, battery electric compact crossover SUV produced by Ford Motor Company, Ford. Introduced on November 17, 2019, it went on sale in December 2020 as a 2021 model. The Mach-E is part of the F ...

. Model year 2024 support includes

BMW i4, i5, i7, iX Bayerische Motoren Werke AG, trading as BMW Group (commonly abbreviated to BMW (), sometimes anglicised as Bavarian Motor Works), is a German multinational manufacturer of vehicles and motorcycles headquartered in Munich, Bavaria, Germany. The ...

, Ioniq 5(2025) and

Hyundai Ioniq 6 The Hyundai Ioniq 6 () is a battery electric mid-size fastback sedan produced by Hyundai Motor Company. It is the second vehicle marketed under the electric car-focused Ioniq sub-brand after the Ioniq 5, and the fourth model developed on the ...

. Other electric vehicles could possibly be updated to support the standard, including the

Volkswagen ID.4 The Volkswagen ID.4 and Volkswagen ID.5 are battery electric compact crossover SUVs produced by Volkswagen. Based on the MEB platform, the ID.4 is the second model of the Volkswagen ID. series. The production version of the ID.4 debuted in Se ...

. Some cars need hardware updates. All

Tesla Tesla most commonly refers to: * Nikola Tesla (1856–1943), a Serbian-American electrical engineer and inventor * Tesla, Inc., an American electric vehicle and clean energy company, formerly Tesla Motors, Inc. * Tesla (unit) (symbol: T), the SI-d ...

vehicles since 2012 (before the release of ISO 15118-2 in 2014) have a

proprietary {{Short pages monitor Besides Tesla, alternatives to Plug & Charge exist including "AutoCharge" based on DIN Spec 70121 (

Combined Charging System The Combined Charging System (CCS) is a charging station standard for plug-in electric vehicles that uses the (CCS1) or (CCS2) connectors, which are extensions of the IEC 62196 Type 1 and Type 2 alternating current (AC) connectors, respe ...

- CCS) using the car's fixed

MAC address A MAC address (short for medium access control address or media access control address) is a unique identifier assigned to a network interface controller (NIC) for use as a network address in communications within a network segment. This use i ...

. For the end-user, the functionality is similar but tied to the specific operator and their charging rates. Autocharge has been used for many years i.e. at the charging stations of

Fastned Fastned is a Dutch company that owns and operates a growing fast charging network of 297 stations with 1,714 EV charging stations in the Netherlands, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Denmark, Italy, Spain and Switzerland. A large ...

. In the market, Autocharge is considered a less secure mechanism than Plug & Charge because the missing certificate chain. Cars from the Volkswagen Group even have had a software update to 'break' this functionality. While Autocharge worked flawlessly at the launch of the ID.3 model, Volkswagen decided they to switch to variable MAC addresses and therefor these cars cannot be used anymore to enable AutoCharge. Some say this is for commercial reasons because the Volkswagen Group heavily invested in Plug & Charge. If Autocharge would become a big success then the need for the development of Plug&Charge would be minimized.

Standard documents

ISO 15118 consists of the following parts, detailed in separate standard documents: * ISO 15118-1: General information and use-case definition * ISO 15118-2: Network and application protocol requirements * ISO 15118-3: Physical and data link layer requirements * ISO 15118-4: Network and application protocol conformance test * ISO 15118-5: Physical and data link layer conformance test * ISO/DIS 15118-6: General information and use-case definition for wireless communication (out of commission, merged with 2nd edition of ISO 15118-1) * ISO/CD 15118-7: Network and application protocol requirements for wireless communication (out of commission, moved to ISO/DIS 15118–20) * ISO 15118-8: Physical layer and data link layer requirements for wireless communication *ISO 15118-10: Physical layer and data link layer requirements for single-pair Ethernet *ISO 15118-20: 2nd generation network and application protocol requirements

Use of ISO 15118 in heavy duty vehicles

The ISO 15118 is also used as communication protocol for charging of heavy duty vehicles as: * Harbor Automated Guided Vehicles * Public transportation When using the ISO 15118 in a commercial operation the use of WLAN (ISO 15118-8) must be considered carefully since there is no way to guarantee operation uptime when using wireless communication based on WLAN. For these situations the same protocol as for passenger car charging can be used (ISO 15118-2).

Overview

V2G-PKI

Plug & Charge

Standard documents

Use of ISO 15118 in heavy duty vehicles

References

See also