Numerous electric vehicle charging stations rendered useless as thieves find new way to cash in

Electric vehicle users in Seattle are experiencing another problem with electric vehicles, and you can bet that this problem will soon spread to other major cities as well.

It seems not a week goes by that we don’t see another new problem with electric vehicles, but at least the still-shaky technology isn’t exactly to blame for this problem. Users in Seattle found open public charging stations and missing copper wiring ripped out by metal thieves.

According to Seattle City Light’s media relations manager Jenn Strang, the problem has been going on for months, according to KOMO-TV.

“Since March 2022, we have seen an increase in activity with people coming to us and removing charging cables from our public charging stations,” Strang said.

“They take the metal and sell it for a monetary gain. Unfortunately, the amount of money they [getting] is nominal. It’s about ten dollars,” Strang explained.

City officials said eight charging stations were recently vandalized by thieves.

However, the repair cost is well over ten dollars. Strang said it costs more than $2,000 to replace each cable, which is in excess of $500 for a technician to install a replacement.

Crime Stoppers of Puget Sound chief executive Jim Fuda told the publication that this is just a new opportunity for metal thieves.

“What is a charging cable? Somewhere from 6 to 10 to 12 feet. They cut him into pieces two to six feet long, quickly drag him out, strip him and sell him to a fence,” Fuda said.

Are Electric Vehicles Doomed to Fail?

As states on the left continue to advance their goal of banning gasoline-powered cars, cities are now facing costly new challenges like this one. And Seattle officials said they were considering ways to stop the copper thieves. One possible idea is to redesign the charging stations so that the charging cables only emerge from the charging station when someone triggers them using a mobile phone app.

“Instead of a charging station that someone [drive] before, it’s something that attaches to the pole, and then you have to have an app, so accessing the app turns the charger off,” Strang said of the proposed redesign.

Meanwhile, the damaged charging stations are down until the city’s repairmen can fix them.

The number of stations attacked by metal thieves may seem small, but it is an ongoing problem that is likely to spread to stations across the country that charge these car batteries, which have serious problems of their own.

The number of charging stations is still problematically low. Seattle, of course, may have less of a problem with that. According to the PlugShare website, there are 471 free charging stations in the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue region and a total of 2,975 stations of all types, including pay-per-charge stations. But while dark blue cities like Seattle do have a large number of charging stations, the country as a whole does not.

According to the UK Daily Mail, the US will have to spend more than $35 billion to upgrade its current electric vehicle charging infrastructure if the country moves to a majority of electric vehicles by 2030.

“America will have to install 30 million e-ports to charge vehicles by 2030 if half of drivers switch to electric vehicles by the time California’s gas car ban goes into effect,” the publication reported in August.

Of course, EV users can always install their own charging stations at home, but they will face high costs.

Cars.com recently paid to install six different types of home electric vehicle charging stations in the homes of its employees and discovered a range of prices and efficiencies. Costs ranged from $1,738 for the cheapest version, mounted on the wall of an employee’s home, to $4,450 for building a freestanding curbside station, to $6,920 for a line that would run from the home to a detached garage. And that’s not counting the nearly $500 added to your household energy bill each year, according to Business Insider.

EVs have a lot of problems that make them more of a nuisance than Joe Biden wants you to think as he constantly pushes EVs on the American public. And now that we have scammers taking advantage of their charging infrastructure, another problem has surfaced.

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texasstandard.news contributed to this report.

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