A new threat is posing more obstacles to electric vehicle ownership for Americans.
Thieves attack charging stations and steal cables. This may mean losing more than $1,000 worth of cables, but the knock-on effect is even greater.
Criminals who cut cables can disable entire stations, forcing owners to desperately search for another working charger that may be miles away.
So-called “range anxiety,” slow charging and a lack of public stations have long deterred Americans from switching to electric vehicles, despite President Biden’s tax credits.
And now broken chargers are exacerbating the problem, giving skeptical buyers one more reason to stick with gas cars for now.
“For the countless reasons people give for EVs not working, wire theft is the one I would be most concerned about,” wrote one user on X, formerly Twitter.
The reason thieves target electric vehicle charging cables is because they contain copper wires.
The price of copper is near a record high in global markets, so criminals can collect increasing sums of cash from selling the material.
But while it costs $1,000 to replace a charging cable, authorities say, thieves can only make $20 by reselling the metal.
Thieves in Seattle were caught on camera targeting an electric vehicle charging station at the edge of a shopping center parking lot.
CCTV footage shows them using bolt cutters to cut several charging cables and load them onto a truck, all in just a few minutes.
And these incidents are on the rise, according to Electrify America, which runs the nation’s second-largest network of DC fast chargers.
While two years ago a cable could be cut perhaps every six months at one of its 968 charging stations, as of May of this year 129 cables had been cut.
This is four more than the total number for all of last year.
At one Seattle station, wires were cut six times last year, said Anthony Lambkin, vice president of operations at Electrify America.
“We’re allowing people to go to work, take their kids to school and go to their medical appointments,” Lambkin told the AP.
“So having an entire station offline has a big impact for our customers.”
Two other leading electric vehicle charging companies, Flo and EVgo, have also reported an increase in thefts.
Charging stations in the Seattle area have been a frequent target. But sites in Nevada, California, Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Pennsylvania have also been affected.
Stations run by Tesla, which operates the largest fast-charging network in the US, have also been attacked in Seattle, Oakland and Houston.
According to Seattle police, thieves have targeted Tesla stations four times this year, compared to just once last year.
But the problem is not limited to urban areas.
In rural Sumner, Washington, about 30 miles south of Seattle, thieves twice cut wires at a Puget Sound Energy charging station.
The company is working with police and the property owner to secure the station, which cost more than $500,000 to install.
Stations run by Tesla, which operates the largest fast-charging network in the US, have also been targeted in Seattle, Oakland and Houston.
The reason thieves target electric vehicle charging cables is because they contain valuable copper wires.
Some electric vehicle owners have expressed frustration online over the growing problem.
“As long as copper is worth money, this will continue to be a problem,” wrote one user on Reddit. “Efficient high-power wireless charging should arrive quickly.”
“I guess if you get into the black market economy, scrap metal is the way,” another added.
Several people suggested that new infrastructure should be implemented that requires people to bring their own cable.
“This is one of the reasons I prefer European style chargers that require you to bring your own cable,” one user wrote.
In one case in Houston, Texas, thieves stole 18 or 19 cables at a Tesla station alone.
Sergeant. Robert Carson, who heads a metal theft police unit in the city, visited the station to inspect the damage and said that in the first five minutes he was there, they had to turn away about ten electric vehicles that needed charging.
Charging companies say it has become clear that thieves are after the copper contained in the cables.
In late May, copper hit an all-time high of nearly $5.20 a pound, resulting in part from increased demand resulting from efforts to reduce carbon emissions with electric vehicles that use more copper wiring. .
The price is up about 25 percent from a year ago and analysts are predicting further increases.
Charging companies say there really isn’t much copper in the cables and what copper there is is difficult to extract.
Carson estimates that criminals can get $15 to $20 per cable at a junkyard. But replacing the cables costs about $1,000.
It urges electric vehicle owners to be on the lookout for suspicious people near chargers and to call the police.
“If people are driving down the road and see a gasoline-powered vehicle, a truck, at a charging station, that probably doesn’t belong there,” he said.
Because charging stations are often located in remote corners of parking lots, Carson suggested many more security cameras are needed.
The Biden administration has set goals to phase out gasoline cars.
Major U.S. automakers have made big financial bets that buyers will shift away from combustion engines and toward electric vehicles as the world faces the worsening consequences of climate change, and the Biden administration announces plans to phase out gradually gasoline cars.
Stellantis plans for 50 percent of its passenger cars to be electric vehicles by the end of 2030.
Ford set a goal of producing 2 million electric vehicles per year by 2026, about 45 percent of its global sales, although it has since suspended that goal.
General Motors, the most ambitious of the three, has committed to selling only electric passenger cars by the end of 2035.
Any of these timelines, of course, depends on whether companies can convince more potential EV buyers that there will always be charging available when they travel.
More than two years after President Biden pledged to build 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations across the United States, only seven are now operational in four states.
In particular, those living in low-income areas face exclusion from the charging network, according to an analysis by Bumper has revealed, with more than 70 percent of America’s public cargo ports located in the wealthiest counties.
This disparity is also stark along state lines: Louisiana, Mississippi, Kentucky and Alabama have the fewest cargo ports per capita, according to the study.