On top of the many obstacles to further EV adoption in the United States, adding insult to injury is whenever public electric vehicle chargers are vandalized with cables cut, rendering the chargers useless. Sometimes this is done out of disdain for electric cars, sometimes thieves strip cables for copper. Either way, it’s just another problem that threatens the industry at a time when growth is slowing.
Now, one of the leading developers of public charging infrastructure says it has designed a cable that’s much harder to cut.
He spoke with the director of ChargePoint, Rick Wilmer Ars Technica and explained how he decided to take action after the chargers at the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters were repeatedly interrupted. Here’s how he describes making the new cable:
“I was literally so frustrated … I was at home in my own workshop, building prototypes and bringing them all my most dangerous tools, to try to cut them, to see what we could come up with,” Wilmer told me. It’s a simple idea, involving hardened steel and “some other polymeric materials that are very difficult to cut through,” Wilmer said.
Claiming that the cable “can’t be cut” is, unfortunately, asking for trouble. Someone will take it as a challenge. In the same sense that you don’t want to call a ship unsinkable, it’s probably safer to say that this new cable is cut-resistant. Luckily, ChargePoint has also developed an alarm that connects to the cable and will start emitting loud sirens when it senses an attempt to cut. That should do a lot of the job in dissuading would-be thieves. Passersby in the mall parking lot will quickly notice if the alarm starts going off.
We shouldn’t live in a world where this is necessary in the first place, but here we are.
ChargePoint says its network now consists of over 38,500 stations with nearly 70,000 total charging ports. To make this new technology available as widely as possible, the company says it will license it to other cable suppliers that make chargers for power grids.
Public chargers remain a major pain point in EV deployment, with frequent outages or inconsistent, unpredictable charging speeds. It is worth bearing in mind that the infrastructure supporting internal combustion engine vehicles has taken a long time to develop and has involved large government investment. We should continue to expect that all EV infrastructure will continue to mature, even if the growth rate of the US electric industry experiences a lull (sales are is still growing overallonly at a lower rate than in recent years).
It’s a completely different story in China, where electric cars are quickly coming to dominate the vehicle market thanks to prioritization by the Chinese Communist Party. The vehicle-supporting infrastructure there is considerably more mature, with recent estimates showing that the country has installed more than 3 million public charging stations. The outgoing Biden administration had hoped to have a much more modest one 500,000 installed in the US by 2030. We may not even get that if the new administration follows through on threats reduce support for industry.