ChargePoint says new EV charging cable that can’t be cut will prevent vandalism

In addition to the many obstacles to further EV adoption in the United States, it adds insult to injury when public electric vehicle chargers are vandalized with cables cut, rendering them useless. Sometimes this is done out of disdain for electric cars, other times thieves strip the wires for copper. Either way, it’s another issue 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 is much harder to cut.

ChargePoint CEO Rick Wilmer spoke with Ars Technica and explained how he decided to take action after the chargers at the company’s headquarters in Silicon Valley 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 taking all my crappiest tools over to them to try and cut them up 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 really hard to drill,” Wilmer said.

Claiming that a cable is “uncutable” is unfortunately asking for trouble. Someone will take this as a challenge. In the same sense that you don’t want to call a boat unsinkable, it’s probably safer to say that this new cable is cut-sustainable. Fortunately, ChargePoint has also developed an alarm that is connected to the cable and will start sounding loud sirens when it senses a cutting attempt. That should do a lot of the job of deterring would-be thieves. Passersby in the mall parking lot will notice quickly if the alarm starts going off.

We shouldn’t live in a world where this is necessary in the first place, but we are there.

ChargePoint says its network now includes more than 38,500 stations with a total of nearly 70,000 charging ports. To make this new technology available as widely as possible, the company says it will make it available to other cable suppliers that make chargers for EV networks.

Public chargers continue to be a major sticking point in EV deployment with frequent outages or erratic, unpredictable charging speeds. It is worth bearing in mind that the infrastructure supporting vehicles with internal combustion engines has been developed for a long time and has itself involved a lot of government investment. We should continue to expect the entire EV infrastructure to continue to develop, even if the rate of growth in the US electric industry experiences a lull (sales are still growing overallonly with a lower percentage compared to recent years).

It’s a very 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 much more mature and recent estimates show that the country has installed over 3 million public chargers. The outgoing Biden administration had hoped for a much more modest one 500,000 installed in the US by 2030. We may not even get that if the incoming administration follows through with threats to reduced support for industry.