Rampant theft at charging stations is emerging as a new problem for the Biden-Harris administration’s broad electric vehicle (EV) push, Bloomberg News reported Monday.
Thieves across the country are targeting public EV charger stations to extract the copper inside charging cables and sell it for cash, particularly in places like Seattle, Las Vegas and Oakland, Bloomberg News reported. Inconsistent charger performance already troubles consumers contemplating making the switch, and executives at top EV charging companies are working on solutions to address the rising tide of theft and vandalism against their equipment.
“It’s all over the country,” Rick Wilmer, president and CEO of ChargePoint, told Bloomberg News. “The types of stuff we’ve seen happen is just horrifying in terms of the way they go about it and how frequently it happens.”
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In just a single day earlier this year, criminals cut into several cables at an EV charging station near ChargePoint headquarters in Silicon Valley, and the company estimates that about 80% of the vandalism incidents it records involve cord-cutting, according to Bloomberg News. About 20% of all attempts to charge an EV are unsuccessful, and 10% of those failures are due to broken or completely missing cables.
The uptick in property crime against EV chargers is “front and center for us and has been really since the start of the year,” Anthony Lambkin, Electrify America’s vice president of operations, told Bloomberg News. Thus far in 2024, the company has seen 215 of its charging cables damaged, a substantial increase from the 79 damaged cords it recorded in the year-earlier period.
Copper is valuable, but thieves looking to make EV vandalism a highly lucrative enterprise would have to steal at scale in order to generate considerable volumes of cash, according to Bloomberg News.
“The financial reward hardly justifies the risk and effort involved,” Travis Allan, the chief legal and public affairs office for FLO, a company that oversees an EV charger network, told Bloomberg News.
However, repairing the damaged equipment is costly for the companies that own it: replacements for slower-charging cables can cost up to $700 apiece while replacing the type of cables that charge EVs more quickly can cost as much as $4,000, Bloomberg News reported. Companies that are dealing with increased property crimes against their gear are exploring a range of strategies to counter the trend, such as using cameras and loudspeakers to scare potential thieves away.
To Sara Rafalson, the executive director of policy for a charging company called EVgo, there is one simple fix that ought to be pursued.
“Ultimately, there needs to be a larger law enforcement response to this,” Rafalson told Bloomberg News.
The Biden-Harris administration, meanwhile, is forging ahead with its ambitious EV agenda despite the problems that criminality is causing for the industry. Despite spending billions of dollars and issuing aggressive regulations to tilt the U.S. auto market in favor of EVs over the coming decade, automakers are losing significant amounts of cash on their EV product lines while consumers remain hesitant to make the switch to EVs and executives back away from short-term production goals.
The White House did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
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