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On top of the many hurdles to furthering EV adoption in the United States, it adds insult to injury whenever public electric vehicle chargers are vandalized with cables cut, rendering the chargers useless. Sometimes this is done out of disdain for electric cars, other times thieves are stripping the cables for copper. Either way, it is but another problem that threatens the industry at a time when it is seeing slowing growth.
Now, one of the leading developers of public charging infrastructure says it has designed a cable that is much harder to cut.
ChargePoint CEO Rick Wilmer spoke to Ars Technica and explained how he decided to take action after chargers at the company’s own Silicon Valley headquarters were repeatedly cut. Here is how he describes making the new cable:
“I literally got so frustrated … I was at home in my own workshop, building prototypes and taking all my nastiest tools to them, to try and cut them, to see what we could come up with,” Wilmer told me. It’s a simple idea, involving hardened steel and “some other polymer materials that are just really hard to cut through,” Wilmer said.
Claiming a cable is “uncuttable” is, unfortunately, asking for trouble. Someone is going to view that as a challenge. In the same sense you do not want to call a boat unsinkable, it is probably safer to say this new cable is cut-resistant. Thankfully ChargePoint also developed an alarm that is connected to the cable and will begin emitting loud sirens when it senses a cut is being attempted. That should do much of the work dissuading would-be thieves. Passersby in a shopping mall parking lot are going to notice quickly if that alarm starts going off.
We should not have to live in a world where this is necessary in the first place, but that’s where we are.
ChargePoint says its network now stands at over 38,500 stations with nearly 70,000 total charging ports. In order to make this new technology available as widely as possible, the company says it will license it out to other cable vendors that produce the chargers for EV networks.
Public chargers continue to be a major pain point in the EV rollout, with frequent outages or inconsistent, unpredictable charging speeds. It is worth keeping in mind that the infrastructure supporting combustion engine vehicles was developed over a long time, and involved a lot of government investment itself. We should continue to expect all of the infrastructure for EVs to continue maturing, even if the rate of growth in the U.S. electric industry is experiencing a lull (sales are still growing overall, just at a lower rate than in recent years).
It is an entirely different story in China, where electric cars are quickly coming to dominate the vehicle market thanks to prioritization by the Chinese Communist Party. The infrastructure there supporting the vehicles is quite a bit more mature, and recent estimates suggest the country has installed over 3 million public chargers. The outgoing Biden administration hoped to have a much more modest 500,000 installed in the U.S. by 2030. We may not even get that if the incoming administration follows through with threats to cut support for the industry.
