Posted on 06/12/2024 2:57:19 PM PDT by Red Badger
Across the U.S., thieves have been targeting electric-vehicle charging stations, intent on stealing the cables, which contain copper wiring
DETROIT -- Just before 2 a.m. on a chilly April night in Seattle, a Chevrolet Silverado pickup stopped at an electric vehicle charging station on the edge of a shopping center parking lot.
Two men, one with a light strapped to his head, got out. A security camera recorded them pulling out bolt cutters. One man snipped several charging cables; the other loaded them into the truck. In under 2½ minutes, they were gone.
The scene that night has become part of a troubling pattern across the country: Thieves have been targeting EV charging stations, intent on stealing the cables, which contain copper wiring. The price of copper is near a record high on global markets, which means criminals stand to collect rising sums of cash from selling the material.
The stolen cables often disable entire stations, forcing EV owners on the road to search desperately for a working charger. For the owners, the predicament can be exasperating and stressful.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
EV's are practical for some use cases. But the only situations like that I can think of involve people who can set up charging at home, not depend on road-side chargers for routine local driving.
Roughly half of the charging stations in our cities are now DISABLED by theft of their charging cords, yet ONLY NOW the media reports on it? One would think that the media is HIDING the downsides of EVs...but no, they would NEVER do such a thing.
When doing any long distance driving, you better have a backup charging station to your backup charging station.
I predicted this would be a problem.
I’m not sure why the charging cable doesn’t stow with the vehicle. Stevie Wonder could have seen this coming.
A bank of chargers is currently being installed in a Ralph’s supermarket parking lot near my house. There’s an 8 foot barbed wire fence currently around it and its located at a major intersection near a police station [Van Nuys Blvd & Burbank, if you know the area].
I’m giving it about 6-12 hours once open before it is stripped.
“The charging companies say it’s become clear that the thieves are after the copper that the cables contain.” Ya Think!!!
I’ll stay with internal combustion.
Need security guards, 24/7. Create some jobs.
“yet ONLY NOW the media reports on it? One would think that the media is HIDING the downsides of EVs...but no, they would NEVER do such a thing.”
LOL! The media trots out the “spike” story again!
—————From 2020-————————
Needless to say, you don’t want to lose it, which is why it’s worrying when we see reports of a spike of charging cable thefts.
https://electrek.co/2020/12/23/thieves-stealing-tesla-charging-cables-suspecting-lock-defect-cold/
We always do. If not, we take the gas pickup. To your point, I'd add to that and say before buying an EV one should look at most of the long trips you take and research if they have good charging options. If not, don't buy an EV. In our case, virtually all of our long trips have plenty of fast charging options. Thus 2 years ago when it was time to replace my wife's car anyway, we got an EV. If most of our trips were through sparsely populated areas it would have been unwise to get an EV.
Even with that, I still wouldn't advise an EV unless you do lots of local driving that you can charge from home. The gas savings and oil change savings of an EV are real --- as long as you regularly drive plenty of miles for the gas savings to be worth the costs of an EV. IMHO, based on the past year's worth of gas and power costs in Alabama, I'd say that's about 12K miles or more per year. In the 2 years we've had our EV we've put 49K miles on it -- over 24K miles per year.
Of course, what will end up happening is that the crazy environmentalists will lot allow the mining, yet at the same time demand that we switch to EVs, and so we will be stuck in a catch 22.
By that time “fossil fuels” will be completely “canceled” leaving us with absolutely nothing but major shortages of energy and food and essentials. Time for pitchforks and torches what little good that will do us.
“Remember who got us into the mess” is what we will be saying.
The gas-station business grew with private ownership, whether small business, oil company owners, or franchisees, etc... Therefore, there were people manning the pumps and stores, who had a strong incentive to not allow theft.
I don’t own and EV, but charging stations I have seen are on the edge of parking lots, in parks, outside government offices, etc.... who owns them? Who watches them?
A couple stations were installed in our local county park with some Fed.gov grant. I’ve never seen an EV plugged into it. If someone stole the wiring at night, no one would even know until the next day. And who would come to fix it? Seems like another silicon valley and woke collectivist fantasy, which will need to adjust to reality.
I don't own one, but it seems Toyota's strategy of plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles, that use electric for short-trips and gas-hybrid for longer journeys, seems to make the most sense if one expects high gas prices.
Why not make the charging cables from aluminum wire?
Prominently labeled.
In several languages.
And hope potential thieves can read.
As did I. So much so in fact, that I've wondered why this hasn't been a widespread issue. I just assumed that since the copper is such an obvious theft target, the cables were heavily armored in some way that made them difficult to cut.
Silly me.
I’m glad it works for you, but most people cannot afford a new EV and a used one is a bigger risk than an ICE car because if the battery pack goes out, it’s $15,000 to replace it.
Perhaps for a single person (one vehicle). But for married couples with two vehicles, it may be better to have one gas vehicle and one fully electric vehicle. Why? A hybrid electric gets only about 50 miles without gas (I'm talking about the newer plug-in hybrids). So if there's a yuge gas shortage/price hike, you'd still be too dependent on gas for my tastes. I don't like having too many of my transportation eggs in one energy basket while the Dims are making it clear that they're using their warmageddon cult energy policies to control us a little more, than a little more, etc.
If the Dims make gas unavailable (or way more expensive than it is now), we'll take the EV on trips. If the Dims make power hard to come by or way too expensive, we'll take the gas pickup on trips. If the Dims make both power and gasoline hard to come by, we won't be able to take long trips but we'd at least do most of our local driving without hesitation in our EV because over 80% of the power we consume at home comes from homemade power with solar (including charging the EV for our local driving).
How many people in metro NY, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington park on the street?
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