You Can Now Use Apple Pay At The Pump — & It’s Awesome

Nobody likes having to fill their car with gas (or at least I sure don't). It's time better spent doing, well, anything else. And I don't know about you, but I always worry about my credit card information being stolen by one of those credit card skimmers. While there's nothing that can be done (yet) about the time spent actually filling your tank, Apple and Exxon have teamed up to make the rest of the gas buying process easier, quicker, and more secure. Starting today, you can use the Exxon Mobil Speedpass+ app to pay for gas with Apple Pay. Okay, I can use an app to pay for gas, big whoop, you might be thinking. We felt the same way until we got a demo of it in action Monday afternoon. The whole process is so quick and smooth. You pull up to the pump, as usual, and before you get out of the car, open the Speedpass+ app. It can identify the station where you are based on your GPS (or you can choose it from a dropdown menu, if there are a few in the area). Tap, then choose the pump number where you are, and press your thumb on the home button to pay via Apple Pay. Like magic, the pump is authorized, your billing information in place, and all you have to do is select the grade and fill up your car. No more fiddling with sketchy card scanners. No more typing out your phone number or zip code on a beat-up touchpad. The whole process takes around 30 seconds. Once you're done filling up (you do have to get out of the car for that), you receive a confirmation on your phone, and the receipt is either emailed to you or printed out, based on your preset preferences in the app. If you drive frequently for work, the app keeps tracks of your purchases, so you can easily identify and list them on an expense report later. While we love this Apple Pay application mostly because we're lazy, it has some important benefits. First, it could help you feel (and be) safer at the pump, since you don't need to pull out a wallet, cash, or a credit card. It also eliminates the threat of your credit card information being stolen since the entire transaction is encrypted and tokenized (more details about how that works here). And if the weather is insanely hot, uncomfortably frigid, or pouring rain, it's less time you have to spend outside. Speedpass+ and Apple Pay are available at 6,000 locations nationally starting today, and will be available at all of Exxon Mobil's 10,000 U.S. locations by the end of the year. You can download the app here, and reduce your gas purchasing suffering henceforth.