ChargePoint develops uncuttable charging cables to stop thieves

Electric vehicle chargers are increasingly a target of vandals, often in search of copper. “Even at our headquarter site here in Campbell, in Silicon Valley, we’ve had our site vandalized twice,” said Rick Wilmer, CEO of ChargePoint. His customers are starting to get fed up with the problem, too, and so Wilmer has had the company hard at work on a solution: an uncuttable cable, which should be ready to deploy by early summer.

“I literally got so frustrated … I was at home in my own workshop, building prototypes and taking all my nastiest tools to them, to try and cut them, to see what we could come up with,” Wilmer told me. It’s a simple idea, involving hardened steel and “some other polymer materials that are just really hard to cut through,” Wilmer said.

As well as making cables for its own chargers, ChargePoint plans to license its invention to others in the industry. “So we’ve collaborated with a few [cable vendors] to build these cables… and we can refer anyone that’s interested to those vendors and give [them] permission to build cables with this technology for someone other than us,” Wilmer said.

Additionally, ChargePoint has developed an alarm to go with the uncuttable cables, called ChargePoint Protect. “If an attempt is made to cut a cable, and you’ve got this feature turned on in our software, then you’ve got all these flashing lights and loud sirens. It’s pretty obnoxious,” Wilmer said.

The software allows a charger operator to group stations together, so if one alarm sounds, they all sound. “So you may damage one cable, but you’re not going to get the whole site, which is what we’ve typically seen happen. I think people motivated by the value of the copper in the cables, or whatever is driving them to do this, they tend to take the whole site,” Wilmer said.

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