25 years of safety tech just became the payment network to solve 'rest & go' parking

The problem with fleet parking is large. We often talk about it in terms of where vehicles sleep, charge, stage, and get serviced. Let's call this the 'rest' stage of parking. But that is not the extent of it. Curb access and temporary parking are also still manual, fragmented, and expensive. Let's call this the 'go' stage of parking.

Most operators have simply accepted the rest & go as two separate frictions. But last fall, everything changed. The parking problem can be solved as a whole.

The technology to unify payments across all parking constructs has actually existed for 25 years. Vehicle-to-Everything, or V2X, has been transforming transportation since the early 2000s. We see it in:

• Snowplows communicating with traffic signals.
• Emergency vehicles clearing corridors.
• School buses getting signal priority.

The technology worked. It proved itself. It just never had the right partners around it to move from safety infrastructure into commercial payment infrastructure. As mentioned, that changed last fall. A powerhouse of partners are now leveraging V2X for payment credentials, starting with tolling and ending with every transaction a vehicle makes.

The vehicle as a payment credential is not new. It's just really happening, at scale. For fleet operators, that arc matters more than the technology itself.

The coalition that changed the equation

Materializing vehicles as payment credentials is built by people who have been in this industry long enough to know exactly what they are doing.

In 1988, James "JJ" Eden co-founded the Interagency Group and co-wrote the business rules and operating procedures for what the world now knows as E-ZPass. Today that network spans 45 agencies across 19 states, serving 49 million transponders and collecting more than $14 billion annually in electronic toll revenues. Eden is now Executive Director of the North Carolina Turnpike Authority, and he is using that platform to build the next layer on top of the infrastructure he spent his career creating.

Beginning in late 2025, up to 200 drivers of Volvo vehicles began paying tolls automatically through their Google built-in infotainment systems. The North Carolina Turnpike Authority is partnering with Volvo Car USA, Mastercard, Microsoft, Red Hat, and Cognizant for the initiative.

The payment architecture behind it is enterprise grade. Mastercard is tokenizing a combination of the vehicle's VIN, license plate, and other information to create a unique and secure payment experience, processed in the same way a digital wallet handles a contactless transaction. Red Hat OpenShift provides the scalable, API-based middleware platform connecting toll agencies and vehicle systems, and Microsoft Azure supplies the secure cloud infrastructure supporting real-time transactions.

Drivers register once. After that, every transaction happens invisibly. No app. No transponder. No friction. The vehicle is the payment credential. Granted, this is a consumer flow where the driver and vehicle have a one-to-one relationship in most cases. However, it's not difficult to imagine a world where seamlessness is applied to fleets.

You may be thinking: one OEM will never work for fleets. Well, that's changing too.

When the APIs open, everything changes

The pilot started with Volvo because Volvo was ready. But the architecture was never designed to stay there. Volvo is developing the tolling app and plans to make it available for free to other automakers that use Google for their infotainment systems, including Ford, GM, Honda, and Nissan. Other automakers using Android Automotive OS will be able to download the application from the in-vehicle Google Play Store, similar to how Android phones download apps from Google Play.

That is the moment everything shifts for fleet operators.

When those APIs open, the payment credential that settles a toll on a North Carolina turnpike today becomes the same token that settles a parking transaction, a curb access window, a delivery stop. The vehicle is already geofenced. The payment is already pre-approved. The transaction happens in the background whether the vehicle is at a managed depot or a temporary street stop three miles away. For the first time, the rest problem and the go problem are part of the same solution.

How is V2X different from LPR

You may be thinking: V2X is just another version of LPR, right? Well, V2X is fundamentally different. LPR is a significant infrastructure investment. Installation costs range from $330 to $600 per space for LPR cameras, and a complete gated system can cost $470,000 over ten years. On top of that, real-world accuracy in parking garages typically lands between 70 and 90%, well below the 95 to 99% that gets cited in marketing materials, because lighting, reflections, and traffic flow in garages are unpredictable. It requires cameras at entry and exit, servers, network infrastructure, calibration, and ongoing maintenance. And it only works at locations where that infrastructure has been installed.

Even while some providers give the technology away for free, parking and physical property owners hesitate to go through the transition.

The V2X model flips that entirely. The intelligence lives in the vehicle, not the facility. The system relies on a combination of in-car software, GPS, and secure mobile payment technologies. For a parking operator to participate, they essentially need to be plugged into the API and have their geofence coordinates registered. The facility does not need cameras. It does not need servers. It does not need to recognize anything. The vehicle already knows where it is, the payment is already pre-approved, and the transaction settles in the background.

For fleets, the massive simplification brings hope to adoption. A depot, a staging lot, a temporary curb stop: none of them need to be outfitted with hardware to participate in the ecosystem. They just need to be on the network.

The curb is the next frontier

The depot is a controlled environment. The curb is not. It is dynamic, contested, and increasingly regulated. Time-restricted zones, school hours, commercial delivery windows, emergency access. For fleet operators, the curb has always been a place where things go wrong. Tickets, fines, wasted time, and in the case of large commercial operators, those costs get budgeted as a line item rather than solved as a problem.

V2X changes that calculus. When vehicles are transmitting real-time data and payments are pre-approved, the curb becomes a manageable, even programmable, part of the fleet's operational footprint. Services like managed lanes, priority routing, and coordinated access can be activated the moment a vehicle enters a connected zone, settled automatically in the background. A delivery vehicle does not need to guess whether it can legally stop. It knows. The access window is pre-approved, the transaction is settled, and the clock starts and stops automatically.

For cities and municipalities, this creates a new revenue and management layer around curb access that has never existed before. For fleet operators, it means the difference between a curb that works against them and one that works for them.

At Mobility Places, we have always seen the facility and the curb as part of the same problem. We source and manage the places fleets operate from. But where a vehicle goes between leaving that facility and returning to it has always been outside the scope of what anyone could systematically solve. V2X, and the open payment infrastructure being built on top of it, is changing that boundary. We're hopeful that V2X helps unify the problem and that the depot and the curb can becoming one continuous, manageable operational environment.