Technology

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:

https://electrek.co/2016/07/21/tesla-ends-its-thin-liquid-cooled-supercharger-wire-experiment-in-mountain-view-but-the-tech-lives-on/

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.