ChargePoint develops uncuttable charging cables to stop thieves
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If in future, we hear of people intentionally setting off ChargePoint® Protect™ alarms near residential areas, then we can assume you were correct all along.
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If they're not deterred by the drivers usually still being IN those cars, well, that's a rather larger problem than I think we've been discussing so far. IME about 2/3 to 3/4 of the cars I see charging at public stations have drivers sitting in them or stretching their legs right next to them.
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Have you not seen videos of some of these jack***"'s?
Some aren't even after the copper, some are just cutting the cables to F with EV owners. (IE I've seen some where they cut the cable while a car is actively charging.
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The first step in initiating a charging session is usually plugging the vehicle in.
I’d be tempted to have a pressurized cable filled with dye/“stank”. They cut the cable , it releases it.
EDIT: I’ve never heard of Skunk Lock before, neat!
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We have always needed to chain down everything. In the days before the always-on interwebs and the 24/7 newscycle, you just didn't hear about it as much (constantly).
Crime is at a 20+ year low. (Not that you would know that from the news and the fear-mongers.)
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I'm not sure there is a practical way to pressurize a massive copper transmission cable to make it into a dye bomb, but I like the mental image.
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Overall, sure. But I certainly didn't personally witness as much copper theft twenty years ago as I have for the last ten.
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That's what happens when income inequality and lack of social safety nets get past a certain point. Remember, most property crime is actually caused by poverty.
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Pulling up to charge at a remote charge station and finding a dead body is surely going to help BEVs in the PR department.
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Nothing like a public demo of Westinghousing an elephant to put people's mind at ease about electricity.
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Though it might actually help public adoption of BEV and chargers in places like TX, AL & similar – public executions of certain classes as entertainment used to be pretty popular there, I believe...
/s
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In fairness, in that respect, the world has always sucked. I don't think that aspect is particularly worse. This just happens to be something where the things are unattended and worth a fair amount. Granted more money involved, but think about how hardened ATMs are just about everywhere. Heck, vending machines aren't even particularly easy to break into to steal the change out of them. Unattended homes under construction are regularly robbed of copper pipe or wiring. Heck, that is one of the selling features of PEX that is less commented on is the fact that thieves usually don't rip out the PEX from a construction site to try to get out the brass connectors to sell at scrap yards. It just isn't worth it compared to all that lovely and expensive copper pipe (of course they still sometimes steal the electrical wiring).
At a guess, I'd think a dozen EV charging cables probably only takes a couple to a few minutes with bolt cutters or an angle grinder to cut off and run off with. And now you've got maybe $1,000 of copper to sell at some of your less savory scrap metal yards. If you make it 4x harder/timing consuming to do and add in alarms (especially that might go back to a security company monitoring some cameras that can then call police), the odds of getting caught and the time involved and risk involved go up dramatically for thieves.
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You won't get much of a magnetic field from a cable with two anti-parallel currents in it. They cancel each other out.
You would need to have two separate 1-conductor cables, each on their own spool.
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Rich people pay others to build said dream garage, but they definitely want one for hobbies. Here's one built to 5000 square feet in Atlanta for working on and washing the car collection. Look at the amount of toolboxes involved.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LackERwbpUM
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You are generally talking 19.2kw as the maximum, 80amp@240v. Though IIRC, 9.6kw, 40amp@240v is the more common cable/home charger maximum. I mean, if you are dead or almost dead, that is a heck of a lot better than a missing cable and no charging, but that is going to take a long time to tack on a lot of charge. But it is probably 30-80 miles of range per hour of charging.
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<s>The murder should be more subtle and indirect - like with fossil fuels.</s>
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Glad of our 22kW street lamp charging stations here, then – that's fast enough to get a pretty good charge even during a longer dinner out in the city or a family visit. And obviously charge up nearly any BEV fully overnight when parking near home on the street. Though one would have thought the electricity provides might have had coordinated the digging schedule for new power cable laying with the network providers – having our pavement dug out twice in a single year (first for fibre, second for beefed up power lines) was a bit inconvenient...
The only problem is dumb ICE drivers that tend to park at those spots inconsiderably, even if there is a free charger‑less spot a block over, at least at the spots that aren't solely reserved for BEV overnight parking only (not all are reserved, obviously, as that would create lots of backlash from the ICE majority).
Though when I think about it, even 10kW at the pavement would be pretty good for most European cities and quite a few US ones too – after all, 95% of drivers don't really drive more than 30 miles or 50 km daily here as well, probably even a lot less...
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Why not just... hear me out here...
Make EV charging stations like gas stations, with on-site personnel?
That would cut down vandalism by a lot.
I will never understand why charging stations aren't just gas stations, but with different dispensers.
Make EV charging stations like gas stations, with on-site personnel?
That would cut down vandalism by a lot.
I will never understand why charging stations aren't just gas stations, but with different dispensers.
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I can't help but wonder if a significant number of thieves are motivated by politics instead of copper.
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If it's a liquid-cooled cable, the color of the coolant is left up to the user. Glitter and skunk spray may be out of spec though.
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That's not quite accurate. You need properly designed equipment to terminate against, as thermal expansion can cause the terminations to come loose. You also can't just twist copper and aluminum wires together with a wire nut, as they will corrode. We don't trust electricians, and we definitely don't trust the average DIYer, to do it correctly.
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The idea is to make changes to increase the security. Making a change isn't a catch-22 situation.
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Some DC fast-charging cables already have tubes with water/coolant inside of them, so it's not too much of a stretch.
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Yeah. Is this whole article a CA, IL problem?
Here in TN I've never seen a Supercharger with a missing cable.
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This isn't about the Tesla supercharger network, which co-locates chargers with businesses that tend to stay busy well into the night / have their own security details already / etc. It's about the third-party networks that frequently DON'T co-locate at gas stations or in shopping center parking lots, and therefore make a more tempting target.
I've seen a few cut Supercharger cables in my own home state of SC. They didn't look like copper theft, they looked like pissy right-wing rage, because they were cut near the plug at the end of the cable, not flush with the charger itself. Who only "steals" the last 1/3 of the cable and leaves the rest in place?
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Reported property crime is down, which is a key distinction. Why bother reporting it if the police aren’t going to do anything anyway?
Now, I’m Canadian, so I have a bit of a different context, but 20 years ago we didn’t have security people in every grocery store. We didn’t have those portable camera units (with the blue lights) in every parking lot.
Sure, fear mongering is one thing but when I see the capitalists spending their own money to try to prevent property loss, it’s not all just imagined.
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I'm wondering if the people who buy Teslas now are shifting to the right because Elon. If so, that would make cutting Supercharger cables in places like SC a bit ironic.
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Then there is this bit about trying to reduce shoplifting
Walgreens Admits What Many Already Suspected About Anti-Theft Measures
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I'm going to be real, the idea of willingly handling something pressurized heavily enough to be effective at deterring cutting, that's been sitting outside in the weather forever, makes me very nervous. Unintentional discharge would suck. Imagine if it went off in an enclosed space due to corrosion or something?
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Also, when you strip store employees down to the absolute bare minimum - which in a lot of cases seems to be no more than one - there are fewer eyeballs keeping watch on things in your favor, or to act as deterrents.
Stores that have employees actively circulating through the aisles have a lot less shrinkage - at least in the front of the house. Most of the shrinkage dollars, though, are going out the back door.
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Wikipedia has an article that explains Canadian society decades ago vs. now:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-trust_and_low-trust_societies
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Not owning an EV, while reading the article, I was wondering why this isn't standard procedure already.
I mean, I get that having the cable there like a fuel pump hose is familiar, but I'd also have thought from the beginning that copper thieves would find them yummy and routinely steal them. But if everyone was a BYOC, pretty much like their devices come with for other electronic things, all they'd need is the plugs for each end into which they'd plug the cable. Standardize the end that goes into the "pump" so everyone has the same thing on that end and the manufacturers could go nuts on however they want the part that plugs into the car to be.
Creating different sockets for different cars for different plugs was the most brain dead thing EV makers ever did. They tried to create barriers to competition, when they should have been working on making them actually be popular in the first place.
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I get wanting secure charging station hardware, but delving so deeply that we awaken the Balrog? Please.
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Although I have seen RV parks that only allowed "house" loads and banned EV charging, so scrutinize the rules with care.
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When I was a kid you could pump gas before paying and no one had heard of catalytic conveyer theft. Something definitely is broken about society these days.
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YetAnotherAnonymousAppellation
Ars Praefectus
Change the charge voltage to 8 kV instead and leave the cables live all the time. Completely impractical (and probably illegal), but the results of an attempted theft would be visually impressive and might be an effective deterrent. It also means the cables can be 1/10 the cross-sectional area so there is much less copper to act as an attractant.
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Figure wearing all black and a face mask, great for a BOLO.
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These idiots try to steal cables from Transformer Stations, if that doesn't scare them away a little sign isn't going to be very effective.
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Locally, the biggest impediment to laws combating catalytic converter theft was a Republican Legislator and scrap-yard owner who claimed it would cause too much paperwork for scrap metal businesses.
Edit:
To clarify, the local converter theft situation has been getting better.
As for why:
Back in 2014, I got a ring made of palladium. Since then, the price of that and the other metals used in catalytic converters has tripled.
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