By Padraig Collins and Steve Williams For Daily Mail Australia
07:41 06 Jul 2024, updated 07:41 06 Jul 2024
A Tesla driver has been slammed after spending more than four hours at a free charging station and preventing other motorists from accessing the site.
The driver was pictured in a charging bay at the Woolworths car park in Kirrawee, in Sydney‘s south, sitting in the front seat and ‘watching movies’.
‘If this is you, do the community a favour and slap yourself,’ a furious Woolies customer wrote on social media, alongside a photo of the car.
‘Utter selfishness when the purpose is for free charging for those that shop at Woolworths.’
The time it takes for an electric vehicle (EV) to get fully charge depends on the make, with some Teslas taking up to eight hours to do so.
As this can mean some cars need an overnight charge, most drivers use their own home charging station.
Where public charging stations are provided for communal use in places such as shop car parks and service stations, it is frowned upon for drivers to spend hours in a single bay.
The outraged shopper in Kirrawee said a Tesla Supercharger – which charges at a faster speed – was available ‘literally across the road’.
They said the person who spent four hours getting a free charge at Woolworths should have used that one instead.
Outrage at how EVs are being charged is growing as vehicle sales increases and the number of charging stations fails to keep up with demand.
On Monday, an EV driver was called selfish after parking ‘horizontally’ at a charging station and blocking other motorists from using the site.
A photo of a white BYD was shared to Facebook and showed the car connected to a charging station in the beachside suburb of Howrah in Hobart.
The unoccupied car was seen parked sideways across the charging bays, restricting access for other drivers and blocking two motorbike parking spots. The bystander who took the photo vented their anger at the driver.
‘Congratulations to this person yesterday, who managed to connect to the charger on the right, while parking sideways across the charging bay on the left AND a couple of bonus motorbike parking bays,’ they wrote.
Social media users were quick to condemn the BYD driver.
‘Don’t expect anyone who buys electric car to have any brains,’ one wrote.
‘They probably completely ran out of charge and had to push it there,’ another added.
‘They are cuttin down on population by takin up all the parkin spaces so anyone else with a f***** normal car had no where to park,’ was another reply.
‘To be fair he drives a EV sense of self entitlement comes naturally to them,’ another wrote.
There are around 198,000 EVs on Australian roads, with two-thirds of these bought since 2022 and 87,000 of these bought in the last 12 months.
Up to 85 per cent of vehicles on Aussie roads will be EVs in the next 40 years.
A lot of that growth is coming to come from China, with Chinese electric carmakers tipped to flood Australia with cheap imports as the Americans and Europeans embark on a trade war to protect their local vehicle manufacturers.
A dozen new Chinese car brands are expected in Australia during the next two years – a situation described as ‘unprecedented’ that will ‘massively change the market’.
Australia has had a free trade agreement with China since 2015, which means cars from our biggest trading partner are sold to Aussie motorists with zero import tariffs or taxes.
Australians are now able to buy cheap Chinese EVs, including the BYD Dolphin for $36,890, the MG4 from $39,990 and the GWM Ora from $35,990.
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