As electric vehicles continue to spread throughout the country, so too do thefts of EV charging cables, which contain valuable copper that can be sold to scrap yards.
Footage of one such attempted theft at a Henderson, Nevada, home was recently captured on surveillance video and posted, appropriately, to the r/videos subreddit.
"A guy with a shirt tied around his head, covering his face, goes into the driveway and repeatedly tugs the EV charging cord," a Fox5 Vegas reporter said in describing the footage.
Eventually, the would-be thief disconnected the cable, triggering an alert on one of the owner's phones. When she opened the front door to see what was going on, he fled.
"From now on, I think we're gonna be charging our car in the late afternoon and making sure we're done with it before we go to bed so there won't be any of those crimes of opportunity," the other owner, Glenn, told Fox5 Vegas.
Public charging stations have been much bigger targets for thieves than private homes. "Electrify America, which has about 1,000 charging stations across the country, told the Associated Press, as of May, 129 cables had been cut so far this year," the Fox5 Vegas reporter said.
Several of the commenters on the Reddit thread were dismayed at the concept of thievery. "Some people will do anything but an honest job," one wrote.
For environmentally conscious consumers, electric vehicles are a superior option to traditional gas-powered cars. EVs create zero tailpipe pollution as opposed to gas-powered cars, which create planet-overheating air pollution whenever they are running.
The popularity of electric vehicles has risen sharply over the past decade but has flattened somewhat over the last couple of years. Even as more public charging infrastructure is built, charging stations' going out of commission because of cable thefts is definitely a problem for the industry — one that it needs to figure out, assuming public shaming around the idea of crime on various subreddits doesn't do the trick.
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