Cracking gas pumps isn't rocket science either
The trick being that there are more, and more competent, crews targeting the merchant transactions than the gas itself. At the end of the day, if a gas or charge vendor is getting hit with any frequency their main defense has nothing to do with the pumps, its' their CCTV and APNR system.
I think their is one important point from the article and this thread that needs to be restated by itself.
Strong regulation is the only thing that will change this market. Ban the crap and mandate something based on a tested and resilient open platform for a decade or so, that way the market is set on the right track, and new entrants will have to follow the existing infrastructure from that point.
Right now the idiots are in charge, and nobody is really planning on building the charge network out in a way that will avoid some pretty obvious face plants. A fine example would be the abandonment of the charge ports for 240v charging from the commercial charge points. DC fast chargers are seen as being where the money is at, and change standards about every year and a half. The commercial charge lots don't want cars sitting around for 8 hours on a slow 240v spot taking up space they are paying for, so they don't have any. As a result, people who buy the EV's and PHEVs they are still selling with those ports are stuck with an unsupported charging system they are unlikely to be able to use on the road.
Since the main thrust of this whole EV push is supposed to be to reduce tailpipe emissions, you want people with PHEVs to run as many electric miles as possible. This also lets those miles come from the lowest impact energy sources. The system we are building does the opposite of that, where most people are going to come home to peak electrical load on the local grid, and have to plug in to start the 8-10 hour slow charge from a residential outlet.
So we need to mandate that in addition to the basic security baseline that EV charge points have at least a few slow charge points, or a mandated down-converter that all of them will support. Otherwise what will be built will only serve the piecemeal fly-by night operators that all hope to be the Uber of paid fast charge stations and will end up being the next Mobike fiasco that other smarter people clean up after. These operators are following a predatory interest to lock out competitors, hoover up installation subsidies, and leave someone else holding the bag.
Regulate the market, plan the rollout, and penalize the violators enough that there is no window for profit off non-compliance. You can say it one line, and yet the regulators are 0 for 3 and still swinging at thin air.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
