Publicly available electric vehicle chargers might not be abundantly common across Australia, but if you’re not going to use one of these chargers and want to use an Australian wall socket that just happens to be unused, you may cop a fine. That’s what happened to an EV driver, as announced by a Western Australian Police Force Facebook post.
The Western Australian Police Force post, with a photo of the EV attached, has gone a bit viral on the social media site. Commenters turned up to either take a quick stab at electric vehicles or noted the severe lack of built-out charging infrastructure across the country.
“It is illegal to use anything other than approved service points to recharge your e-vehicles,” the Facebook post read.
“A motorist stealing electricity was charged and issued a $500 fine. Hidden CCTV footage captured it all.”
If you’re wondering what’s going on in the photo above, the car is a Polestar 2 (which we called our favourite electric vehicle of 2022). The driver is using the included emergency charger, which connects to an Australian wall socket, to charge the vehicle — and has plugged it into a power box in a bit of bushland.
Gizmodo Australia has reached out to the WA Police for additional context, but as the post reads, the driver wasn’t allowed to hook his car up to this power box. Australia has an expanding network of electric vehicle charging stations across the country, and while these are often subject to outages and long queues, you’ll have to use them and… well, not just any old wall socket you come across. That’s electricity theft.
WA Police then put up another post clarifying that you shouldn’t need to do this.
Some good points were made in the comments of the original post.
“Maybe put in more infrastructure so we have the option to charge in remote locations,” one commenter noted.
“If local areas want more tourists, spending time and money in a town, add charging stations,” wrote another.
The Western Australian government is currently planning a state-wide network of EV chargers, and is working with Jet Charge on the project.
Additionally, keep in mind that the charge on offer with emergency chargers (like what this driver has used) is very slow. The 7-metre AC charging cord provided with a Polestar 2 would need likely over a day to fully top-up the battery, depending on the charge level (though could be used, as we said, in the case of an emergency, if you just needed to add a dozen kilometres or so into the battery).
Anyway, stick to established public EV chargers or your home EV charger — you’re less likely to be fined. We’ve reached out to the police in other states to ask if similar fines would be imposed in similar situations.