Blocked Bays and Failed Handshakes: Many 'online' Ev Chargers Are Unusable

Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago

gnabgib

15 points

7 comments

theconversation.comTechstory

calmnegative

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Electric VehiclesCharging InfrastructureSustainability

Key topics

Electric Vehicles

Charging Infrastructure

Sustainability

The article highlights issues with public EV chargers being unusable despite being online, sparking discussion on the challenges of EV adoption and infrastructure reliability.

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Oct 15, 2025 at 2:54 PM EDT
3 months ago
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Discussion (7 comments)

Showing 7 comments

ToucanLoucan

3 months ago

4 replies

I'm curious why EV chargers seem to have so many more problems with vandalism than gas pumps. Is it just because EV chargers are typically not "manned" in any way? Or do we simply not hear about vandalized gas pumps because gas stations are so ubiquitous and themselves have more refueling points than a charge station to where occasional vandalism doesn't really affect the ability of people to refuel?

Or, option 3: culture war idiocy?

mrguyorama

3 months ago

2 replies

Option Q; Gas pumps have less copper to steal

But when people like Aging Wheels on youtube or friends do cross country trips to evaluate how feasible such a trip is in electric vehicles for their audience, they find 10-50% of chargers to just be broken, no vandalism in sight. They will just be non-functional or randomly degraded function, or were poorly specced to begin with and be unable to deliver sufficient power to multiple vehicles at once. They simply do not get monitored and repaired in a timely fashion because the companies running them do not care.

Electrify America for example is something that VW set up as a "we are sooooo soorrrrryy" venture after the emissions scandal, so they aren't exactly invested in it being great.

Tesla Superchargers meanwhile more often are available, functional, and meeting their claimed specs. It's very good that they "opened" the system up.

ToucanLoucan

3 months ago

I was going to question how that's worth more than all the metals in a gas pump, but then I considered that fucking with a gas pump is probably notably more dangerous than an EV charger. The huge conductors that actually do that lifting aren't, AFAIK, energized until the unit detects a car that needs charging. They can probably just snip them off if they're of the mind to do so.

itopaloglu83

3 months ago

As always, it's the sales vs maintenance issue.

Maintaining any system is a lot of work, we don't see it much but even gas stations get broken or vandalized, but things get fixed. People tend to think that all we need to do is build things, but maintenance is a heavy task on its own, and nowadays everything is falling apart, especially when there are subsidies to only build these charging stations, so nobody cares about them once they're up and running even for a moment.

estimator7292

3 months ago

EV chargers are frequently located in some back corner of the parking lot, away from the storefront where humans can see, and out of sight of CCTV unless the property owner added them.

GauntletWizard

3 months ago

EVs chargers are known to contain about 5 lb of copper per cable, which is only about two bucks at black market scrap prices, but still enough to be worthwhile for the tweakers who are stripping it.

jerlam

3 months ago

There are a lot of subsidies / incentives for installing EV chargers, but keeping them operational is a different question entirely. Especially if they aren't actually making any money. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the early EV charging companies have already gone out of business.

I've been in parking garages where none of the existing EV chargers were functional, but they're busy installing new ones.

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ID: 45596907Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 3:29:00 PM

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