Tesla Installing Countermeasures as People Are Hacking the Cables Off Superchargers
Tesla Installing Countermeasures as People Are Hacking the Cables Off Superchargers
Amid a spate of vandalism at Supercharger stations, Tesla appears to be employing countermeasures to head off the theft of its copper cables.
Just get rid of the charging stations. It's ridiculous that EV owners should expect to charge their cars anywhere but at home or at work.
I'm going to disagree with you on the sentement. We need a better infrastructure for EVs, and non-tesla vehicles can use those charging stations (either via adaptor, or a few use that same plug type.)
Wait, do they not all use the same plug? Forgive my ignorance on EVs, my car is 60 years old.
With ya on infascructure. Would like to see better build quality than tesla stuff though, and hardware you own not locked behind pay walls. Add standardization to the list I guess.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJOfyMCEzjQ
This guy has done several videos on EVs and their plugs but this one is what I feel is most relevant.
Just get rid of the charging stations. It’s ridiculous that EV owners should expect to charge their cars anywhere but at home or at work
why the hell is that ridiculous? People do go places other than home and work. People take road trips and vacations. Electric cars are a good thing, just because one particular brand is owned by a narcisist ruining the country.
Also, not everyone has a parking spot with electricity. How are you supposed to charge if you're parking on a random place on the street, like most people do? I'd joke about "lower a chain of extension cords from your 20th floor", but that would be assuming you can park next to your home at all. My building's parking, for example, had all its spots sold out by now, while the very few ones for sale in the neighborhood cost a fortune. Apparently, they were affordable if you bought the apartment new, but on a secondary market - no.
I don't care about any particular EV brand. Trying to use battery powered EVs for such purposes means that they need to built with heavy, oversized, extra hazardous batteries. The responsible, proper use case for BEVs is short trips with plenty of time for charging at home or work.
So your suggestion is basically families should own an EV just for getting around home.. and a gas guzzler for long distance travel? IMO the ideal should be a slow phase out of the gas cars.
Or you know... instead of needing super heavy batteries... they could have smaller batteries... if charging stations become common enough that people can relatively easily find places to stop and charge on long trips.
Just get rid of the fuel stations. It’s ridiculous that vehicles owners should expect to refuel their cars anywhere but at home or at work
Just get rid of the cars. Build cities built for human communities, not for cars and mega corporations. Electric vehicles are a band-aid solution that’s not going to save us, and doesn’t solve the fundamental problem.
If people want to go somewhere, they can just walk. They have two perfectly good legs and nobody is stopping them.
I'm inclined to agree that all motorized personal vehicles and their attendant infrastructure should be eliminated. However, you're making a false equivalency. I live in New Jersey, so it takes maybe five minutes for me to completely refuel my car with gasoline. My understanding is that it takes six times as long to charge a big EV to ~80%. Therefore, a single fueling station can serve many more people with a much smaller footprint. Furthermore, fuel gets consumed, whereas batteries are mostly dead weight that occasionally do the thermal runaway thing.
I really like the "thermal runaway thing" expression, and yeah it is a false equivalency but it’s a funny one.
EV charging and the tech around it can be slow today, but it doesn’t mean we should abandon and go back to what we know is working (as some people want to). This is a recipe for zero innovation and not the way to become a Star Trek like civilization.
In my city there are electric buses that charge in a few seconds at some stops along the route. No overhead wires, no big diesel engines and no noise.
We just need to work and improve those new vehicles, find better than the actual EV and combustion engines as well.
Just get rid of the charging stations. It's ridiculous that EV owners should expect to charge their cars anywhere but at home or at work.
Why would it be ridiculous for EV owners to charge cars away from home or work? l'd say that it's pretty necessary for long-distance trips.
EDIT:
Long distance power transmission is normally done with aluminum lines, rather than copper.
https://www.anixter.com/en_au/resources/literature/wire-wisdom/copper-vs-aluminum-conductors.html
Aluminum has 61 percent of the conductivity of copper, but has only 30 percent of the weight of copper. That means that a bare wire of aluminum weighs half as much as a bare wire of copper that has the same electrical resistance. Aluminum is generally more inexpensive when compared to copper conductors.
Resistance is a function of the material's conductivity and the cross-sectional area of a cable. If aluminum has 61% the conductivity of copper, then one needs 1÷0.61=1.63 times the cross-sectional area for an aluminum cable to have the same resistance. That's a radius 1.63^0.5 = 1.28 times the radius of an equivalent copper cable.
So you only need an aluminum cable with a radius 28% larger to achieve the same overall resistance.
In the case of the EV charging cables, flexibility is at a premium, and increasing the radius decreases that. But my guess is that it's probably within the range of acceptability to use a bulkier aluminum cable, if need be.
EDIT2: I was also going to suggest liquid-cooled cables, which electric arc furnaces use for their power busses. Apparently Tesla already tried using experimental liquid-cooled cables, a decade back:
Tesla’s Mountain View Supercharger has always been a little different from the rest. Not only is it located at the world-famous Computer History Museum – where Tesla sometimes holds events, but until recently, it was also running an experiment utilizing propylene-glycol-cooled supercharging cables…
These cables are thinner and more flexible than the standard Supercharger cables which are about as thick as gas station hoses and sometimes more unwieldy, especially in cold weather when they become less flexible.
We’ve gotten word today that Tesla has switched out the experimental cables in Mountain View for the standard thicker cables, thus ending the public experiment. Officially Tesla told us “We changed the cables to unify service procedures and parts across all current Supercharger sites.”
That would have been liquid-cooled copper, but one could presumably also do liquid-cooled aluminum. That's another option, if one wants to keep heat under control with higher resistance from a cable. Probably some extra cost for the cooling system, and there's some extra waste of energy as conversion to heat that way, but I doubt that it'd make EV charging impractical, were that what was required to deal with people stealing copper.
l'd say that it's pretty necessary for long-distance trips.
Battery powered EVs should not be used for long-distance trips.
I mean...I agree with you that EVs are relatively-poorly-suited compared to ICEs for long distance trips, and if I had both a gasoline-powered and electricity-powered vehicle, I'd use the gasoline-powered one for a long-distance trip... but not everyone is going to own both. It's hardly reasonable to say "well, people who own EVs just can't travel long distances".
The idea that EV owners should only be able to charge at home is a joke I hope? Should they not be allowed to travel?
Just get rid of the charging stations. It's ridiculous that EV owners should expect to charge their cars anywhere but at home or at work.
Freaking BASED.
But for long-distance trips, that doesn't really hold up until we get battery capacities vastly superior to those of today. For countries with workers that have vacations, we like to go places other than home or work, sometimes. 😅
Aren't EV batteries already big enough? As in, you probably shouldn't drive more than 8 hours or so in a day without taking a long break and getting a good night's sleep. There many models on the market with that capability, right? Also, if that's the type of driving you're doing frequently, an ICE vehicle or ideally an FCEV would be a better choice, just in terms of avoiding battery wear and tear and reducing the amount dead weight you're schlepping around. If you're only going on long drives occasionally, just rent a suitable vehicle or consider another from of transit like a train or a bus and then rent a little EV near your destination.
What if you work remote and live in an apartment building without plugs???
Instead of socializing the cost of putting charging stations everywhere, landlords and employers should be forced to provide outlets.
Lmao. Unfortunately I live in the USA.
Anything with a Tesla logo on it is fair game.
They must have a lot of copper. Thieves are going target them. What can you do in a land of criminals?
Fix the system so people don't have to make money by stealing copper.
And yet, here we are with billionaires in charge—robber barons v2.0.
Call the coppers on them!
Oh...Considering the voltages and amps going through it is safe to assume those are fairly thick solid copper wires yes.
I just think installing these BEV charging stations everywhere is a bad idea in the first place.
He was already selling flame-throwers. That would be hilarious.
EVs are for saving the car/oil cartels, not for saving the planet.
That is an interesting position. How do you figure?