If you drive an EV, you need to make sure the battery is charged so that you can get where you need to go.

That might mean relying on EV chargers in parking lots at your destination.

What would you do if all of the EV spots were occupied by non-EVs?

Not charging your car means you can’t drive home!

The person in this story came up with a clever solution to this problem.

Let’s see how the story plays out.

You don’t move cars in the wrong spaces? Well I’ll park here then

This happened to me back in early 2015.

We’d just recently made the move to purchase a new EV.

At the time the batteries in the EVs were small compared to today and only had around a 60-80 mile range.

Well one of our first larger journeys was to a shopping centre about 60 miles away.

We chose to go to this shopping centre as it also was one of the first places to have EV charging compared to other shops and at the time the charging was still free.

So we hoped to go there, get a free charge while shopping and then head home with a full battery.

There was a problem.

Before we set off we checked the charger was working through its app and once we were happy we made the journey.

When we arrived we found where the chargers were placed and ran into our issue…

They were working fine but they were fully blocked by non EV cars.

The bays were marked but for whatever reason people had parked in them.

No worries I thought and I went into the centre to the information desk to ask if they would announce for whoever to pop to their car to move it.

The person at the info booth wasn’t helpful.

They said they didn’t do that and wouldn’t.

I explained I needed to charge to get home and could they please make an exception.

They would not and so I angrily dropped a hint about them clamping the car or leaving a ticket on it.

They said they don’t do that either.

In fact the car park was not monitored at all as it was free to park for the day so no cameras were needed to monitor the car park and there were no car part attendants.

He had to find a solution to charge his car.

“So you don’t do anything about incorrectly parked cars?” I asked.

They answer I got was a firm no from the information desk person and they really didn’t want to be bothered again.

As I got back to the car I saw there was a pavement to the edge of the chargers.

The chargers were situated close to the building but the pavement was in a place that wouldn’t be used much when walking around the car park.

It also didn’t lead anywhere and more importantly didn’t lead to any disabled or parent parking spots.

It was also very wide… Which gave me an idea.

Seems like a reasonable solution.

I then drove to the end of the car park, mounted the wide pavement, made sure there was no one around and slowly drive to the chargers.

My cable then reached, I started the charge, locked the car and went shopping.

I got back to the car at the end of the day with some form of employe (possibly security but wasn’t sure) in front the centre looking perplexed at our car parked on the pavement.

Things have changed.

I just unlocked the car, pulled the cable away and drove off with a full charge.

Safe to say the next time I went a year later there were signs on the EV bays stating parking restrictions, there was a fine for non EVs and they were marked with more paint to make them extra obvious…

Oh and a couple of bollards at the end of the pavement where I mounted the curb.

Sounds like the shopping center learned how important it is to make sure EV spots are only occupied by EVs.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story…

It all worked out.

This sounds like an annoying setup.

Why would people with non-EVs park there?

This EV owner has resorted to using stick-on notes.

I think so too.

Don’t park in an EV spot if you don’t drive an EV!

This seems like common sense.

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.