Vandalism at electric vehicle charging stations occurs for a variety of reasons. A post on Reddit's r/ElectricVehiclesUK highlighted an increasingly common and disruptive form of it.
Like gas-powered cars, EVs require fuel to run, and charging equipment is visually similar to gas pumps.
Drivers can't fuel their gas-powered cars if a pump's hose is cut or missing. The same thing goes for EV drivers if a charging cable is compromised — which is precisely what happened to the original poster.
"Had this yesterday — pulled up to charge, cables been cut off," they explained in a post titled "Cable theft."
The user linked to a BBC article highlighting an uptick in EV charging cable theft in the United Kingdom.
U.K.-based charging network InstaVolt told the outlet that cable theft had become a "significant issue." 13 of its stations were targeted 33 times.
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Delvin Lane, CEO of InstaVolt, said cable theft cost the company £410,000 ($539,000) between November 2023 and April 2025. Drivers who commented on the story worried that escalating cable vandalism could discourage other drivers from buying an EV.
"If vandals and thieves take chargers away, we're not going to go forward, it's not going to help," said EV owner Keith Burry to the BBC. "It's going to give more people concerns and may even stop people buying electric cars."
As EV adoption began in earnest, EV vandalism and attacks on charging stations followed. In some instances, the incidents were driven by ideological opposition to clean energy, not unlike the "coal rolling" trend.
Unfortunately, the motive behind EV charging cable theft was even more compelling: their valuable copper can be sold as scrap metal. The BBC made no mention of the copper they contained, possibly to avoid inspiring future thefts.
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Would you go out of your way to stop at a business that has EV charging stations? Click your choice to see results and speak your mind. |
Definitely 👍 However, Reddit's EV drivers were all too familiar with the issue and its causes.
"It's the copper content of the cable. The higher the power charging station, the more copper is going to be in that cable," one user explained.
"It's utterly depressing, isn't it? Any decent thing gets smashed, vandalised, or stolen by those at the bottom. And we get robbed blind by those at the top," another dejected commenter said.
Amid the valid complaints and anecdotes, one user had an interesting proposal to ensure EV charging stations remain as functional as their gas-dispensing counterparts.
"Charging stations need to be designated critical infrastructure so the thieves get real sentences," they suggested.
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