Charging cables cut at 28 EV plugs across three Ballarat sites during AFL Grand Final long weekend

What happened in Ballarat

Charging cables at 28 electric vehicle plugs across three locations in Ballarat were reportedly cut during Victoria's AFL Grand Final long weekend, AutoTalk Australia reported. Updates posted to the crowd-sourced PlugShare app indicated that 20 plugs at Tesla's recently upgraded Lucas Supercharger site and six at its Wendouree location were affected. Two cables at an Exploren fast charger at the nearby Bedggoods Kia dealership in Wendouree were also reported damaged. ¹

Yahoo News Australia reported that up to 20 ultra-fast Tesla charging stalls near a petrol station in Lucas were stripped of their cables, rendering them unusable. One driver who discovered the damage on Saturday night said the chargers had all appeared brand new and warned others to plan carefully over the long weekend, given the limited chargers then available across the Ballarat region. ²

AutoTalk Australia reported that a motorist posting photographs on Reddit said they arrived at the Lucas site to find cables cut from both its new and older charging units, and that images of the damage were also shared through the Tesla Owners Club Western Victoria Facebook group. Social media posts indicated repairs to the affected chargers were under way by Monday. ¹

Cause and motive remain unconfirmed

AutoTalk Australia reported that Victoria Police, Tesla and Exploren had not publicly confirmed the extent of the damage or whether any cables were removed, and that the cause and motive remain unconfirmed. The report did not establish that the cables were taken for their copper value. ¹

Yahoo News Australia, citing CarExpert, reported that throughout 2025 and 2026 Australia has seen an uptick in EV charger cable thefts, with cables deliberately destroyed or removed entirely as opportunistic thieves attempt to cash in on the price of copper. Yahoo News Australia described the Ballarat incident as highlighting the extent of a wider national issue, with drivers calling it a senseless act. ²

Charging infrastructure in Ballarat

EV Roadside, an Australian charging and roadside information site, lists Ballarat's charging landscape as of September 2026: Open Charge Map lists nine public charging locations within 25 kilometres of the centre, five of them DC fast, with two rated at 350 kW. The Tesla Supercharger at Coltman Plaza Shopping Centre in Lucas has ten stalls at up to 250 kW, runs 24 hours a day and is open to non-Tesla vehicles with CCS compatibility, while Tesla's original Gillies Street North site has six stalls at up to 120 kW and is not listed as open to other brands. ⁵

EV Roadside also notes a gap worth planning around on the Western Freeway east of Ballarat: on its route data there is nothing between Melton and Warrenheip, where Evie operates a pair of 350 kW CCS2 chargers at the Shell Coles Express about seven kilometres east of the city centre. The RACV-backed Chargefox ultra-rapid station on Davies Street in the CBD is also rated at up to 350 kW. ⁵

A national trend in copper theft

The Sydney Morning Herald reported that thieves are chopping off public electric vehicle charging cables to steal copper as scrap metal prices have soared. Victoria recorded 2592 incidents of copper and other scrap metal theft in 2025, up from 998 in 2016, according to the state's Crime Statistics Agency; in New South Wales there were 879 incidents specifically of copper theft, up from 612 in 2019, according to the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research. ⁴

Yahoo News Australia quoted Hussein Dia, Professor of Transport Technology and Sustainability at Swinburne University, as saying there is no doubt EV charging cable theft is becoming a more significant infrastructure issue in Australia, with incidents reported in different states including Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland, and some locations appearing to have been targeted repeatedly. ²

Yahoo News Australia also reported on a Toowoomba case, in which two Evie chargers at a local shopping centre were destroyed with all four charging cables missing. Local EV driver Peter Wimshurst told Yahoo News Australia that the site had been targeted multiple times and that, as a Nissan Leaf owner with an older-style plug, those Evie chargers were the only ones in the city he could use. ³

The economics and the industry response

The Sydney Morning Herald quoted Geoff Brady, chief operating officer at Evie Networks, as saying EV chargers are the new frontier in an old crime. He said a typical DC charger cable would contain two to four kilos of copper, with copper priced at $US13,732.50 a tonne on the London Metal Exchange at the time of that report, meaning the crime is not terribly lucrative; the customer experience, he said, is the casualty, because a site is offline for a period while the copper value is small. ⁴

Yahoo News Australia also quoted Dia as describing vandalising EV chargers for copper as relatively low-value theft capable of causing very high-value disruption, since the scrap value of the copper is small compared with the cost of replacing the cable, sending technicians to the site, losing charging revenue and inconveniencing motorists. ³

The Sydney Morning Herald reported that Evie has moved from reactive replacement of vandalised cables to layered prevention, improving lighting and camera coverage, introducing protective cable sleeves and on-site security at vulnerable sites, and sharing information on hit sites, camera footage and police case numbers with other charging companies. It also reported that NSW Police arrested a man in the Newcastle area over alleged damage to EV charging stations in the Newcastle-Hunter region and Central Coast, allegedly locating 17 EV charging handles, cutting tools and stripped cables at the arrest. ⁴

Yahoo News Australia, citing CarExpert, reported that across Victoria better lighting, CCTV cameras and alarms, and the use of aluminium cables for public EV chargers have all been enlisted to help curb the issue, and that Evie is attempting to stop copper theft with its CableGuard technology, a protective sleeve that makes cables harder to cut, although thieves have still managed to get through on some occasions. ²

Yahoo News Australia quoted Dia as saying no physical protection system is necessarily theft-proof and that the important question is whether technologies such as CableGuard reduce successful thefts, increase the time and difficulty involved, and improve the ability of police to identify offenders. ²

Dia also told Yahoo News Australia that a charger that appears on a map but has had its cable cut is effectively no charger at all, which matters particularly on regional routes where the next fast charger may be a considerable distance away, and that Australia is investing heavily in expanding the charging network, so reliability and resilience now need to receive as much attention as simply increasing the number of chargers. ²

Why the Ballarat outage mattered locally

EV Roadside's Ballarat guidance notes that the Western Freeway run to Melbourne is about 115 kilometres with no chargers at Bacchus Marsh or Ballan on its route data, meaning drivers rely on the Warrenheip and in-town sites at either end of the leg. With the Lucas and Wendouree Tesla sites reportedly out of action over the long weekend, and Warrenheip and the Davies Street Chargefox sites carrying the fast-charging load in the area, the damage reduced the charging options available to EV drivers in and around the city during a busy travel weekend. ⁵¹²