EV Charging’s Dirty Little Secret

Your Tesla Bricked in 14 Minutes

You plug in your Tesla at a public charging station, pull out your phone, and scroll through social media while waiting. What you don’t realise is that in those 14 minutes, security researchers proved in controlled tests that a modified charger head can disable a Model Y — though no real-world case exists of a random attacker remotely bricking an EV in production networks. At Pwn2Own Automotive 2025, security researchers proved they could disable a Tesla Model Y in under 15 minutes using a specially modified charger head loaded with malicious firmware (Scharnowski & Buchmann, 2024).

And the charging station you’ve just connected to might contain hidden communication devices sending your personal data to servers abroad. Your car, your data, and potentially your safety are now compromised, and you willingly plugged right into the trap.

Electric vehicle (EV) chargers’ security vulnerabilities pose significant risks, potentially compromising customer data, home and corporate networks, and even power grids.” — Jay Johnson, Sandia National Laboratories (Wired, 2023)

I don’t want to play the “China as bogeyman” trope. But concern is warranted, as you will see. You will also see it is not “about China”- Anyone from the US, Israel, China, Russia, hell, even North…