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North Carolina turnpike officials demonstrate in‑car payment pilot using Volvo, Mastercard and open APIs
Summary
North Carolina Turnpike Authority executives presented Tollsea, an in‑car payment platform that uses tokenized payments and vehicle identifiers to let drivers pay tolls via an app in the car. The authority plans a pilot with 100 Volvo vehicles and said the approach would eliminate transponders and improve security.
JJ Eden, executive director of the North Carolina Turnpike Authority, told the Washington State Transportation Commission that the authority is piloting an in‑car payment approach it calls Tollsea that removes the need for a physical transponder.
Eden and Manish Jarian, the authority's chief technology officer, said the system links a vehicle’s tokenized payment method (via Mastercard and other processors) with a vehicle identifier so the car itself becomes the payment instrument. "You put in your credit card number. It's gets sent to Mastercard, Visa, American Express, whoever, and it's tokenized, with a very secure token, and then the credit card number is wiped out," Eden said, describing how the payment flow preserves privacy and reduces fraud risk.
The presenters described two technical approaches tested in pilot work: a direct V2X option that requires on‑vehicle hardware and a network V2X option that uses the vehicle’s cellular connection to a cloud middleware router. Manish Jarian said the authority built middleware that routes vehicle transactions to payment gateways and can interoperate with multiple OEMs. He added that standards work (SAE and open APIs) and certification (OmniAir) underpin their approach.
The authority has enlisted Volvo as an initial OEM partner and plans a controlled pilot of roughly 100 vehicles before larger scale deployment. Eden said partners on the project include Mastercard, Microsoft and Red Hat (middleware), with Cognizant as systems integrator. He emphasized potential secondary use cases beyond tolling — parking, mileage‑based services and vehicle‑sourced pavement condition data — that could run on the same platform.
The presenters framed the technology as a way to reduce operations and customer‑service costs, minimize roadside infrastructure needs, and avoid the RF‑interference and placement issues associated with legacy transponders. "The biggest advantage is the security," Eden said, noting tokenized network payments and the ability to use a vehicle’s digital VIN or virtual ID as a secure link to a payment token.
Commissioners asked about pilot design, impacts on intermittent users such as rental cars, and credit‑card fees for microtransactions; Eden and Jarian said the system supports short‑term enrollments for rental vehicles and that network tokenization could eventually reduce interchange fees for small transactions. The authority said it is moving cautiously and prefers white‑label apps that OEMs can distribute rather than requiring fragmented vendor solutions.
Next steps: the authority expects to begin its small Volvo pilot in the near term and to scale if results meet reliability and privacy expectations.
