At V2C, we’ve been closely following the evolution of ISO 15118 for years, the international standard that defines the digital communication protocol between an electric vehicle and a charging station. It’s not a standard that stands still: each new revision adds features, from automatic authentication to bidirectional charging, and staying up to date is part of how we work, both in developing our chargers and in our integration with the power grid.
As part of that work, we’ve set up an open ISO 15118 testing and simulation lab, designed so that anyone with a technical background can understand how the standard’s certificates work and test their own implementation.
ISO 15118 Plug & Charge Lab by V2C
Simulate certificates and validate your implementation.
Table of Contents
Why we closely follow ISO 15118
ISO 15118 is the piece that allows an electric car and a charger to understand each other digitally: they negotiate the charging session, handle authentication and, in the most recent versions, enable bidirectional energy flows. It’s a living standard, with successive revisions that expand its capabilities, and it carries growing weight in European regulation on charging infrastructure, which is increasingly pushing towards interoperability and automatic cross-brand authentication.
For a charger manufacturer, this means implementing the standard once isn’t enough: you have to constantly validate communication with different vehicles, protocol versions and certificate chains. At V2C, we dedicate specific effort to this, and this lab is a way of sharing part of that work with the rest of the industry.
What Plug & Charge is and why it depends on certificates
Plug & Charge is the ISO 15118 feature that lets the vehicle authenticate itself at the charger without an RFID card or app: just plug in the connector and the session starts. This process relies on a public key infrastructure (PKI): the vehicle presents a digital certificate, the charger and the backend validate it through a chain of trust, and charging is only authorised if that chain is correct.
Understanding that certificate chain (who issues it, how it’s validated and what happens when something goes wrong) is precisely what’s hardest to visualise without dedicated tools. That’s where the lab comes in.
Our Pole Pro charger already supports Plug & Charge with ISO 15118-2, so if you have one in your installation, you can see on a real charger how the very same mechanism that the lab lets you simulate works.
ISO 15118-2 and ISO 15118-20: our goal
Within the ISO 15118 family, two versions in particular shape the path we’re following at V2C. ISO 15118-2 is the one that currently underpins Plug & Charge in most real-world deployments: automatic vehicle authentication using certificates, with no cards or apps, and one-way charging (from the grid to the car).
ISO 15118-20 is the evolution of that foundation and where we want to get to: it adds bidirectional communication (V2G, V2H, V2L), security improvements in certificate exchange and support for more advanced charging scenarios, such as automatic connection or wireless charging. It’s the standard that makes possible, at protocol level, everything we’re already exploring in products like the bidirectional Trydan.
Working with both versions today, and not just the most widespread one, is what allows us to have our chargers ready as real-world adoption of ISO 15118-20 advances across the industry.
That’s precisely why the lab includes a quick view of certificate creation, handling and management for each of the two standards separately, so you can see at a glance how the certificate chain, and its level of complexity, changes when moving from ISO 15118-2 to ISO 15118-20.
The lab: from IEC 61851-1 to ISO 15118-20
The ISO 15118 Plug & Charge Lab is an open environment that lets you simulate the Plug & Charge mechanism and see in practice how the certificates involved in the process are built and validated. It covers the full range of vehicle-to-charger communication scenarios, from IEC 61851-1, classic PWM signalling with no digital communication, through ISO 15118-2, all the way to ISO 15118-20, the most advanced version of the standard. We’ve also recently added meters, so you can test how the energy delivered during the session is reported and validated too.
It’s a tool designed for technical profiles: integration teams, developers working with OCPP and charging backends, or anyone who needs to understand or debug their own ISO 15118 implementation without having to set up a physical test bench.
We invite you to try it
This lab is still under development, and we’re especially interested in feedback from those of you who work with ISO 15118 every day. If you try it, tell us about your experience: it helps us validate the mechanism and keep improving it.