EV owners suffer online glitches

A Tesla owner has told the Herald he’s been “trying to do the right thing” and register for road user charges (RUCS) before the May 31 deadline.

But for three days, he has encountered the error message below when trying to buy a licence on the NZ Transport Agency’s website.

He has still not been able to prepay, as required, for at least one unit of RUCS. They are sold in $76 blocks, each covering 1000km of driving.

An NZTA spokesman said: “There have been no outages of the online purchase portal. However, via our contact centre, we are aware of some customers having issues making payments.

“Upon investigation, we have found that these payment issues are often device-related.

“The complex nature of internet usage, including factors like cached information, can potentially affect online payments.”

The Tesla owner, who works in the tech industry, said there was nothing unusual about his setup.

“The ‘device’ I’m using is a desktop Mac and I’ve tried three different browsers – Chrome, Safari and Firefox – over the last couple of days and got the same error message.”

Given the NZTA’S error message instruction says “If you continue to receive this message, you’ll need to call us”, the Herald tried calling the agency’s 0800 number.

After a 7-minute, 11-second wait, an operator said there was no option to buy RUCS by phone.

She confirmed that, if you can’t buy an RUC licence online, you can buy one over the counter from an Nzta-approved agent, such as the AA or VTNZ. That will cost slightly more, however. There’s an admin fee of $12.44 each time you prepay for a block of mileage online, compared with $13.71 over the counter.