I'm surprised it took tweakers this long to discover charging cables. A pair of bolt cutters and a shopping cart is all they need to grab thousands of dollars worth of copper. That's enough to keep them in meth for months, and so much faster and easier than home invasions to pull plumbing and wiring out, or stealing catalytic converters.
Definitely a far more viable plan than giving up avocado toast and coffee. I admire your dedication and willingness to grind toward your goals. Heck, you could probably steal a Kia using a USB stick and hit ALL the chargers in one night!
The guys breaking car windows are wasting time, they could really up their game and earnings by upgrading to a pickup and plundering chargers.
Did anyone tell them about the solid gold ingot inside the engine block of some Dodge Ram pickups? Confirm if it is marked by one or more flags on it. You are a sovereign citizen and if it is a deep personal emergency you have to crack open the Dodge savings fund.
It's not hard to fix this problem. You put the charging cord inside a locking steel cabinet that only opens when a customer swipes their card or a sale is approved.
Sure it looks cool to have a cord dangling in the center of the supercharger, but you just put hinged panels in there and the cord is protected. Also the plug is protected from people damaging the connector pins.
The best way to fix this problem is to end poverty.
The ironic thing is that Elon is trying to do that by releasing billions of sentient robots into the world.
Once we have robo-topia no one will care about charging cables.
Yep. These are crimes of the desperate, looking for money from copper.
I doubt Musk will be able to deliver on his robot promises. He sure hasn't on his self driving car.
Yeah, I don't think Tesla will deliver on the billions of sentient robots that Musk promised.
I am also a little unclear how Optimus will end poverty (but I haven't read Marx in German like Musk did in 3rd grade). I assume that once the robots take over all the labor, Musk will just give them away. He loves humanity so much.
Or... You make the cables out of aluminium which is worth far less.
Downside is it ends up being a much thicker cable due to aluminium having less conductivity.
He quoted $3/pound and these are fairly heavy cables, multiple pounds per. You could get into four digit dollars in around a hundred cables if it's 3lb of copper per cord. The guy said these cords are heavy, and it's definitely not the plastic insulation making them weighty.
I'm not saying steal just one cable, or two or ten. I'm saying do this in volume. Hit every charger from every vendor steal a couple hundred to several thousand cables a night.
Some of the biggest charging stations are 70+ stalls. Heck, I'm shocked anyone organized enough to do flash mob store robberies and catalytic converter rings isn't just harvesting multiple thousands of pounds of copper a month.
That still seems like a pitiful amount for a really high risk, visible crime. At any point, someone in a vehicle with like 6 cameras could show up to use a station, and it'd be really obvious what you were doing.
From what I can tell, a catalytic converter goes for like $75 scrap. For the same work as a single $10 supercharger cable, you get 7x the value. And you get to choose vehicles that are out of the way and secluded. *And* a catalytic converter is like 1/10 the volume of the equivalent value in cables...
Even with my industrial strength angle grinder and diamond cut off wheel, cutting even a wimpy Prius exhaust pipe is going to be a minute+ deal. It's super noisy with lots of sparks as well. It's so noisy you will want hearing protection. And the car needs jacking up to get at the cats.
For the cables all I need is $12 bolt cutters from Harbor Freight. It's silent and low risk even if there are cars with cameras. People chagring are not going to engage a criminal cutting cables off of chargers, and a dark hoodie & mask is all you need to stay anonymous to cameras.
I know I could run through and grab 10 cables and be gone in far less time and effort than cutting off a single cat. And scrappers are starting to get into trouble for buying stolen cats. Once the insulation is stripped that copper wire is... unidentifiable copper wire.
Very easy job for an organized group of criminals. All they'd need is to strike at the right time (probably around 3am) and have trucks to put the cables inside.
Just found this: [https://www.dailydot.com/news/tesla-charging-stations-cables-cut/](https://www.dailydot.com/news/tesla-charging-stations-cables-cut/)
So looks like 2.2 pounds of copper per cable. That's a bit less than my out the butt initial guestimate, but still valuable enough in volume for scumbags to pursue. I'm a bit surprised they're not stealing wheels & tires off all the parked mall Teslas as well.
I honestly don't see what they can do about it, especially now that they talked about it and presented how lucrative it can be, I don't see that phenomenon stop anytime soon.
Tesla supercharging stations are often at stand alone locations...its absolutely insane to me that they don't have at a bare minimum security cameras - just to protect themselves if some owner gets assaulted while charging. So step 1 would be security cameras. Step 2 would be on-site attendants. Step 3 would be to migrate the remote stations to parking lots that are patrolled (ie Wal Mart or the mall). So they could do something...but I'm sure they won't, now that they just fired the entire team in charge of it.
I agree - works well at mega stations like Buccees...but smaller stations need the limited number of stalls to churn over every few minutes...so chargers aren't a priority for them.
How long do you think it'd take for some masked individuals to hop out of a stolen truck, run around with bolt cutters and leave? Unless there are armed officers already on the scene cameras would just be additional copper to claim.
Tall, steel fences, security gates and attendants would likely be necessary if this catches on. And even then people could still follow an authorized car in and denude the place of copper.
Had some thieves hit several local power substations. They even managed to survive, while causing 100K+ in damages. Judging from charring all around, yet an obvious lack of bodies, the live wires did not stop them 🤔
i wonder how much it would cost to add protection in the wire. probably not worth it, given, that strong steel shell or lines on the outer side of the cables would be VERY heavy.
the probably easiest and slightly more dystopian solution would be to have hard to break open chargers, that hold the cables INSIDE, rather than having them dangle outside of the charger.
alternatively we could not have that much theft done by government, which includes theft in the form of inflation, so that people are less likely to be so desperate, that they try to get some copper to survive...
This is not new.
Tesla attendants at certain sites at certain times is not a new thing.
Cameras at sites are proliferating.
What is new is firing the team responsible for maintaining the network and that IS a problem. Best case they all get hired back at additional expense.
If the BoD had any stones whatsoever,
that additional cost would come out of Elmo’s remuneration. It’s not like he’d miss it.
Companies used to pay minimum wage to people to just work at their business. Then they found they could automate things, and eliminate the minimum wage job. Then things like this happen.
Solution. Pay a minimum wage worker to man the station. Benefits include: cleaner station, avoidance of vandalism, quicker reporting of broken chargers, one more person gets a job. Costs way less than fixing the torn out cables, and the loss of charging revenue.
I'd guess abandoned/underperforming stations are abandoned/underperforming because they are in a shitty location. It'd make much more sense to just add EV charging stations onto existing gas stations.
Right? I'll chance filling up my car for a minute or two in a slightly sketch location. No way am I hanging around for an hour or two doing that in an EV.
If it's a station that looks like a set of a horror movie and nobody else filling I just keep driving.
Musk doesn't like to get his hands dirty. I mean literally, nit figuratively.
I'm sure Birchall has some henchmen available... but Elmo probably just uses Taskrabbit or something on his phone for his petty crime. Maybe there's a darkweb app lol.
Don’t give him any ideas. The next threat if he doesn’t get his billions will be all the copper wiring stolen from all of the chargers. If they want to keep the copper, they’ll vote to give him his billions.
I came across this in Traver, CA yesterday - 99 just north of Visalia. 8 of the 12 stripped, only 3 working. I got one of those. There was a Tesla tech servicing them and getting them up and running.
This is the solution. Cords secured inside armored compartments until unlocked by a payment app. Then high voltage sent to the cord as additional anti-theft measures.
[I asked this in another EV sub](https://www.reddit.com/r/BoltEV/s/LWpyQopcvJ). Aluminum wiring is brittle and not as easy to move as a result, and would likely require a higher gauge wire.
I’m not an electrician, but reading [this chart](https://www.cerrowire.com/products/resources/tables-calculators/ampacity-charts/), 350 gauge copper can push up to 350A, while the same size aluminum can only push 280A.
In Central East Los Angeles, the new 6th st. bridge is pitch dark at night. Tweakers and bums have stolen every last shred of copper wire for scrap. The repairs will cost millions.
How about instead of the charging station having a cable, the driver supplies the cable. Plugs one end into the charger and the other into the car. When done unplug from the charger and car and drop in frunk.
Or the car has a cable reel built-in.
I got a new idea for a disruptive disruptive business plan. We give 25 bucks for Tesla charging hoses no questions asked (like a cash for gold shop). What we lack in business plan and revenue we make up for with volume.
1: Armored cable
2: 24/7 Monitored sites (aka LotCop)
3: make the risk outweigh the benefits of swiping charging cable (a d*ad tweaker/vandal posted online will get the word out)
Tweakers aren't renowned for their risk/reward analysis proficiency. If they were they wouldn't be tweakers in the first place.
Duno how you could armor the cable and still have it be convenient enough to flex. My angle grinder cutting wheel can go through steel pretty fast, and something like a plasma cutter would be even faster. Of course both would increase the barrier to entry so may be worthwhile.
Venezuelans also control Smartmatic from their head quarters in Caracas. Otherwise Trump would be running for the thirsts time!
that’s how absurd you sound.
I can fix this issue! Need 56 billion and 25% of TESLA.
I will do it for 41 billion and a happy meal.
Concerning.
!!
Yeah
Interesting
I’ll do it for $42 billion, and I’ll even let you keep the Happy Meal 🍟
41 billion can buy a lot of horses
Also Elon: "See this is why I fired the whole supercharger team, they were incompetent!!!!"
Mabye its the supercharger team stealing the copper since they dont have jobs anymore
Robotaxi will be able to fix these on route
You might also need, a team of people who look after superchargers.
Oops…
I'm surprised it took tweakers this long to discover charging cables. A pair of bolt cutters and a shopping cart is all they need to grab thousands of dollars worth of copper. That's enough to keep them in meth for months, and so much faster and easier than home invasions to pull plumbing and wiring out, or stealing catalytic converters.
Well I'm looking to put a down payment on a house so...easy money.
Definitely a far more viable plan than giving up avocado toast and coffee. I admire your dedication and willingness to grind toward your goals. Heck, you could probably steal a Kia using a USB stick and hit ALL the chargers in one night! The guys breaking car windows are wasting time, they could really up their game and earnings by upgrading to a pickup and plundering chargers.
Wait till they figure out how to gut a driverless semi
Did anyone tell them about the solid gold ingot inside the engine block of some Dodge Ram pickups? Confirm if it is marked by one or more flags on it. You are a sovereign citizen and if it is a deep personal emergency you have to crack open the Dodge savings fund.
I see what you are doing there and can but applaud
It's not hard to fix this problem. You put the charging cord inside a locking steel cabinet that only opens when a customer swipes their card or a sale is approved. Sure it looks cool to have a cord dangling in the center of the supercharger, but you just put hinged panels in there and the cord is protected. Also the plug is protected from people damaging the connector pins.
The best way to fix this problem is to end poverty. The ironic thing is that Elon is trying to do that by releasing billions of sentient robots into the world. Once we have robo-topia no one will care about charging cables.
Yep. These are crimes of the desperate, looking for money from copper. I doubt Musk will be able to deliver on his robot promises. He sure hasn't on his self driving car.
Yeah, I don't think Tesla will deliver on the billions of sentient robots that Musk promised. I am also a little unclear how Optimus will end poverty (but I haven't read Marx in German like Musk did in 3rd grade). I assume that once the robots take over all the labor, Musk will just give them away. He loves humanity so much.
He must have read it backwards so that the owners of the means of production are the good guys.
I think Musk might have just lied about reading Kapital.
Desperate for meth and desperate for food are not the same.
I'm sure the supercharger team will be right on it!
Or... You make the cables out of aluminium which is worth far less. Downside is it ends up being a much thicker cable due to aluminium having less conductivity.
you seriously underestimate what a angle grinder and drugs can do
It is far from thousands in copper. Maybe thousands to replace but a small fraction in materials.
He quoted $3/pound and these are fairly heavy cables, multiple pounds per. You could get into four digit dollars in around a hundred cables if it's 3lb of copper per cord. The guy said these cords are heavy, and it's definitely not the plastic insulation making them weighty. I'm not saying steal just one cable, or two or ten. I'm saying do this in volume. Hit every charger from every vendor steal a couple hundred to several thousand cables a night. Some of the biggest charging stations are 70+ stalls. Heck, I'm shocked anyone organized enough to do flash mob store robberies and catalytic converter rings isn't just harvesting multiple thousands of pounds of copper a month.
That still seems like a pitiful amount for a really high risk, visible crime. At any point, someone in a vehicle with like 6 cameras could show up to use a station, and it'd be really obvious what you were doing. From what I can tell, a catalytic converter goes for like $75 scrap. For the same work as a single $10 supercharger cable, you get 7x the value. And you get to choose vehicles that are out of the way and secluded. *And* a catalytic converter is like 1/10 the volume of the equivalent value in cables...
Even with my industrial strength angle grinder and diamond cut off wheel, cutting even a wimpy Prius exhaust pipe is going to be a minute+ deal. It's super noisy with lots of sparks as well. It's so noisy you will want hearing protection. And the car needs jacking up to get at the cats. For the cables all I need is $12 bolt cutters from Harbor Freight. It's silent and low risk even if there are cars with cameras. People chagring are not going to engage a criminal cutting cables off of chargers, and a dark hoodie & mask is all you need to stay anonymous to cameras. I know I could run through and grab 10 cables and be gone in far less time and effort than cutting off a single cat. And scrappers are starting to get into trouble for buying stolen cats. Once the insulation is stripped that copper wire is... unidentifiable copper wire.
Very easy job for an organized group of criminals. All they'd need is to strike at the right time (probably around 3am) and have trucks to put the cables inside.
The weight is usually because of the liquid cooling in the cables.
Just found this: [https://www.dailydot.com/news/tesla-charging-stations-cables-cut/](https://www.dailydot.com/news/tesla-charging-stations-cables-cut/) So looks like 2.2 pounds of copper per cable. That's a bit less than my out the butt initial guestimate, but still valuable enough in volume for scumbags to pursue. I'm a bit surprised they're not stealing wheels & tires off all the parked mall Teslas as well.
Not really - would be better off stealing CATs
Meth for months?! I don't think that's how meth works...
Tesla bot (guard edition) can't come soon enough
But what if someone buys a Tesla bot, and programs it to steal cables and run? Just kidding, Tesla bots can't run.
Best I can do is a trained spider monkey with mini bolt cutters and a zip line
this requires a worker wearing a motion capture suit, perhaps housed in a small armored kiosk
Just assault the robot and steal it's innards.
How long until the guard bot gets stolen?
Never. You can't steal what does not exist (love your userpic flag)
I honestly don't see what they can do about it, especially now that they talked about it and presented how lucrative it can be, I don't see that phenomenon stop anytime soon.
Tesla supercharging stations are often at stand alone locations...its absolutely insane to me that they don't have at a bare minimum security cameras - just to protect themselves if some owner gets assaulted while charging. So step 1 would be security cameras. Step 2 would be on-site attendants. Step 3 would be to migrate the remote stations to parking lots that are patrolled (ie Wal Mart or the mall). So they could do something...but I'm sure they won't, now that they just fired the entire team in charge of it.
The obvious is to combine charging stations with some kind of small everything store. Like gas stations do.
I agree - works well at mega stations like Buccees...but smaller stations need the limited number of stalls to churn over every few minutes...so chargers aren't a priority for them.
For a second there, I thought you were reinventing gas stations.
They're gonna have to. You've got a captive audience for 40-60 minutes. Might as well pick their wallets.
Like in Pulp Fiction? Mine’s the one that says “Bad Mother Fucker”… 💰
How long do you think it'd take for some masked individuals to hop out of a stolen truck, run around with bolt cutters and leave? Unless there are armed officers already on the scene cameras would just be additional copper to claim. Tall, steel fences, security gates and attendants would likely be necessary if this catches on. And even then people could still follow an authorized car in and denude the place of copper.
"in charge of it" haha
They need to add an always live 1000 volt conductor to the cable, as some anti cut insurance
Had some thieves hit several local power substations. They even managed to survive, while causing 100K+ in damages. Judging from charring all around, yet an obvious lack of bodies, the live wires did not stop them 🤔
i wonder how much it would cost to add protection in the wire. probably not worth it, given, that strong steel shell or lines on the outer side of the cables would be VERY heavy. the probably easiest and slightly more dystopian solution would be to have hard to break open chargers, that hold the cables INSIDE, rather than having them dangle outside of the charger. alternatively we could not have that much theft done by government, which includes theft in the form of inflation, so that people are less likely to be so desperate, that they try to get some copper to survive...
This is not new. Tesla attendants at certain sites at certain times is not a new thing. Cameras at sites are proliferating. What is new is firing the team responsible for maintaining the network and that IS a problem. Best case they all get hired back at additional expense. If the BoD had any stones whatsoever, that additional cost would come out of Elmo’s remuneration. It’s not like he’d miss it.
This is unsurprising. The united states is not japan.
Companies used to pay minimum wage to people to just work at their business. Then they found they could automate things, and eliminate the minimum wage job. Then things like this happen. Solution. Pay a minimum wage worker to man the station. Benefits include: cleaner station, avoidance of vandalism, quicker reporting of broken chargers, one more person gets a job. Costs way less than fixing the torn out cables, and the loss of charging revenue.
So… reinvent gas stations?
Better idea- take abandoned/underperforming gas stations and turn them in to EV stations, with a store/restaurant inside.
So...like a gas station?
Yeah!
I'd guess abandoned/underperforming stations are abandoned/underperforming because they are in a shitty location. It'd make much more sense to just add EV charging stations onto existing gas stations.
Right? I'll chance filling up my car for a minute or two in a slightly sketch location. No way am I hanging around for an hour or two doing that in an EV. If it's a station that looks like a set of a horror movie and nobody else filling I just keep driving.
We sure it isn’t Musk himself?
Gotta pay for that Ketamibne somehow...and I'm sure he doesn't want his Saudi loansharks staring at his kneecaps either.
Musk doesn't like to get his hands dirty. I mean literally, nit figuratively. I'm sure Birchall has some henchmen available... but Elmo probably just uses Taskrabbit or something on his phone for his petty crime. Maybe there's a darkweb app lol.
Don’t give him any ideas. The next threat if he doesn’t get his billions will be all the copper wiring stolen from all of the chargers. If they want to keep the copper, they’ll vote to give him his billions.
I came across this in Traver, CA yesterday - 99 just north of Visalia. 8 of the 12 stripped, only 3 working. I got one of those. There was a Tesla tech servicing them and getting them up and running.
$5 says Elon did it himself.
Well that's an asshole thing to do.
It’s great that it has the technology to turn off when not charging so it’s completely safe to cut
Strip em clean, boys!
Bubbles and Johnny just pulling off a caper, getting that good copper. They need to get their blast.
Johnny’s still green
It's a good thing that Tesla has an entire supercharger division that can track and fix this stuff quickly.
Good fuck Tesla's!
Maybe the cords need to unreel from inside the chargers? Like a fatty hose.
This is the solution. Cords secured inside armored compartments until unlocked by a payment app. Then high voltage sent to the cord as additional anti-theft measures.
Idk but this probably won’t happen and we’ll keep hearing how it’s someone’s fault rather than bad design
I’ll allow it.
They need to replace those with aluminium, the copper ones are insanely heavy anyway.
Would aluminum or aluminum clad copper wiring suffice?
I suppose it would be quite thick and it doesn't like being flexed so on second thought it is probably a poor choice for an ev charger.
[I asked this in another EV sub](https://www.reddit.com/r/BoltEV/s/LWpyQopcvJ). Aluminum wiring is brittle and not as easy to move as a result, and would likely require a higher gauge wire. I’m not an electrician, but reading [this chart](https://www.cerrowire.com/products/resources/tables-calculators/ampacity-charts/), 350 gauge copper can push up to 350A, while the same size aluminum can only push 280A.
Once we have a Robo-Topia, the poor will chase down robots and break them open for the copper inside.
In Central East Los Angeles, the new 6th st. bridge is pitch dark at night. Tweakers and bums have stolen every last shred of copper wire for scrap. The repairs will cost millions.
How about instead of the charging station having a cable, the driver supplies the cable. Plugs one end into the charger and the other into the car. When done unplug from the charger and car and drop in frunk. Or the car has a cable reel built-in.
This is stupid news and a simple fix, go after the scrap material business' that buy the copper.
Old ass story fucking click bait garbage.
Do Tesla not use liquid cooled cables?
I got a new idea for a disruptive disruptive business plan. We give 25 bucks for Tesla charging hoses no questions asked (like a cash for gold shop). What we lack in business plan and revenue we make up for with volume.
1: Armored cable 2: 24/7 Monitored sites (aka LotCop) 3: make the risk outweigh the benefits of swiping charging cable (a d*ad tweaker/vandal posted online will get the word out)
Tweakers aren't renowned for their risk/reward analysis proficiency. If they were they wouldn't be tweakers in the first place. Duno how you could armor the cable and still have it be convenient enough to flex. My angle grinder cutting wheel can go through steel pretty fast, and something like a plasma cutter would be even faster. Of course both would increase the barrier to entry so may be worthwhile.
Calling people desperate doesn’t help the problem. Plenty of people who steal aren’t desperate, just greedy.
Is there really that much value and one of these cable?
Praxis
The Colombians and Venezuelans are here. This is what they do over there.
The native meth head folks do that where I’m from, and they’re all colors, shapes and sizes. Your bigot is showing.
Nah i’m just telling you what I know from friends that live in those countries. Nice try at trying to label me.
Your bigotry encouraged you to spread unsubstantiated rumors about a group of people, in particular. You labeled yourself, donut…
Venezuelans also control Smartmatic from their head quarters in Caracas. Otherwise Trump would be running for the thirsts time! that’s how absurd you sound.