You Should Never Plug This Device Into Your Car's 12V Socket

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Before cars came standard with USB slots, they primarily provided electricity through 12V sockets. These components were originally designed to help light cigarettes, but today they supplement USB adapters and power a wide variety of gadgets. You can even charge your phone if you have the right adapter. The wrong adapter, meanwhile, can damage it.

The dark secret of many phone chargers, especially the inexpensive ones, is that no two are built to identical standards. The same is true for 12V car adapters. A charger on sale is usually fine, but dirt-cheap ones are often built with substandard parts and lack the proper safety tests. These gadgets provide what is called "dirty power," potentially unstable voltages and electrical currents that make internal circuits work much harder than they should or were even meant to.

This excess stress, well, stresses out the components, producing much more heat than usual and shortening the phone's lifespan. While it's smart to spend the extra cash on a phone charger to guarantee you aren't purchasing a low-quality item, 12V adapters won't exactly break the bank. You can buy a quality product on Amazon for less than $20.

Most phone chargers aren't just built to refill the battery; they're also designed to protect it. Low-quality chargers lack many of the safeguards of standard adapters, but what threats do these dirty power chargers pose? Again, they make the battery wear out faster, but that's a best-case scenario. An errant current can fry the phone's main circuit board, but these chargers pose a risk to everything they're connected to.

Pretend for a moment that a cheap 12V socket adapter does indeed destroy your phone's motherboard. When that happens, the same burst of unregulated electricity that travels into the phone also makes contact with the charging port, and if it's enough to brick a phone, it's definitely powerful enough to damage the port. That's two expensive pieces of equipment you'll need to repair and replace. This sudden blast of electricity can also blow a fuse in the car, which can make multiple systems malfunction depending on which ones share the fuse with the 12V socket.

These are easier to fix and replace, but unless you're a car DIYer, they often require a trip to your local repair garage. Of course, some dangers to a phone brought on by low-quality chargers can also threaten the car. An overheating battery is a fire risk, and in a worst-case scenario, it can combust and set your car ablaze. Basically, any damage a shoddy 12V charger causes to a smartphone can and will carry over to the surrounding area.