HOUSTON – Imagine pulling into the gas station only to find out that someone cut all of the hoses attached to the pumps.
That’s the equivalent of what happened at a Houston-area electric vehicle charging station over the weekend.
Drivers pulled into the Kipling Street Tesla Supercharger only to find that all but one of the cords to plug into their vehicle was cut clean and stolen.
The Houston Police Department tells KPRC 2′s Gage Goulding that 18 of the 19 charging stations had their cables stolen, according to a report that was filed by a Tesla service technician on Monday.
“Yeah, I’d be pretty upset about that,” said Alex Longo, who’s traveling through Houston on his way to San Antonio. “I would have been in trouble.”
You likely would be too if you really needed to use that charger and the plug and cord were missing.
“I mean, I love my EV but the anxiety of running out of juice,” Vincent Evangelista said while charging his Tesla.
Tesla Supercharges recently were opened up to other makes and models of vehicles to also tap into the expansive network of electric vehicle chargers built by Elon Musk.
The Superchargers get their name from the impressive jolt they’re able to give electric vehicles in such a short time.
At this location, they can deliver a max charge rate of 250kW at 500 DC volts.
In simple terms, that’s enough electricity to power more than three average American homes.
So, what would happen if you came in contact with that much energy?
“Oh, it would kill you in an instant,” said Cameron Trial, owner of CPR EV Repair.
But it didn’t. Why?
“The cables themselves are not live. The supercharger has to make communication with the car before it powers the cable,” Trial said. “But that’s not to say that you could have a faulty supercharger. That the cable was always live. And if that’s the case, and you try to cut through it, you’re going to kill yourself.”
This leads him to believe that whoever is behind this crime likely knows what they’re getting into.
Trial was able to come up with two reasons.
“Personally, I think it’s, it’s an anti-EV movement,” he said.
Someone who hates electric cars so much that they’d risk a felony and their life.
Or it could be what’s under the black coating of the cable: copper.
“For the amount of work it took to do that and, the risks that it takes, it’s not worth your life,” Trial said.
Copper thefts have been a problem in the Houston area, so much that the Houston Police Department has a Metal Theft Unit.
However, it’s too early for investigators to call copper theft a motive in this case.
Tesla didn’t respond to KPRC 2′s request for comment. However, all of the chargers were replaced and functional by Monday evening.