A Tesla charging station in St. George, Utah was allegedly vandalized this week, a Tesla owner reported on Twitter.
Mark Larsen, a Tesla Model 3 owner in Utah, read on a forum Friday that the charging station might have been vandalized, and went to check it out himself, Electrek reports. He found that the charging plugs had been drilled into, and a cable had been damaged.
As we reported last month, anti-Tesla “protests” seem to be on the rise. Several cases of “ICE-ing,” where people park their fossil-fuel-powered vehicles in designated electric vehicle charging spots to block anyone from using them, have been documented on Reddit and elsewhere. (The I, C, and E in “ICE-ing” are taken from “internal combustion engine.”)
In one incident, at a North Carolina convenience store called Sheetz, Reddit user Leicina reported that several pickup trucks pulled in to block all the spots of a Tesla charging station.
The problem is widespread enough that some cities and states are passing laws to prohibit the practice (so far Florida, California, Oregon, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Washington are among those with rules on the books).