The proliferation of electric vehicles has spurred the research interest in technologies associated to it, for instance batteries, and charging mechanisms. Moreover, the recent advancements in autonomous vehicles also encourage the enabling technologies to integrate and provide holistic applications. These technologies along with connected car, play a pivotal role in the realization of intelligent transportation system (ITS)- a perfect example of machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. To this end, one key requirement for electric (autonomous) vehicles (EAVs) is to have an efficient, secure, and scalable infrastructure and framework for charging, billing, and auditing. Currently, the electric vehicles charging and billing is based on traditional means of stop-charge-and-pay mechanism, whereas future charging-on-the-move together with autonomous cars demand new, secure, efficient, and scalable billing and auditing mechanisms.
To this end, the current manual charging systems for electric vehicles may not be applicable to the autonomous cars that demand automatic, secure, and yet scalable billing and auditing system. Owing to the distributed systems such as blockchain technology, in this paper, we propose a new charging and billing mechanism for electric vehicles that charge their batteries in a charging-on-the-move fashion. To meet the requirements of billing in electric vehicles, we leverage distributed ledger technology (DLT), a distributed peer-to-peer technology for micro-transactions. Our proof-of-concept implementation of the billing framework demonstrate the feasibility of such system in electric vehicles. It is also worth noting that the solution can easily be extended to the electric autonomous cars (EACs).