An electric vehicle claims he copped a foul-mouthed tirade of abuse from a ute driver who was blocking a charging station.
To add insult to injury the ute driver allegedly even stayed put just to deny the facility to Sydney man Salim Tootooni.
In a Facebook post Mr Tootooni said he wanted to use the charger in the EV bay at Stanhope Village shopping centre in Sydney‘s north-west, which he does regularly, but that a ute was parked there.
An EV driver said he was met with foul-mouthed abuse for asking a ute to move out of a designated charging bay at a Sydney shopping centre
The sole occupant of the offending vehicle was a woman sitting in the passenger’s seat.
When Mr Tootooni asked if the ute could be parked in some of the other spots available the woman said the male driver was in the shopping centre buying medicine that she needed to recover from surgery.
However, she expected him to return shortly and free the space so Mr Tootooni went back to his vehicle and waited 10 minutes until the man showed up.
Mr Tootooni said he asked the man politely to move his ute but was met with a flat-out refusal and an aggressive statement of ‘no, I’m not going to’.
Even offering Mr Tootooni’s spot to the ute driver was of no avail.
So Mr Tootooni was forced to wait another 20 minutes as the man went back to pharmacy but he said the ute driver grew much more threatening when he returned, even challenging the EV owner to a fight.
‘I didn’t want to have a fight or anything else,’ Mr Mr Tootooni told Yahoo News .
‘So I just went back to my car and he said a lot of stuff like ‘you f***ing dickhead’ and ‘you’re f***ing inconsiderate as f***’, just talking those kinds of words, but I didn’t respond.
Salim Tootooni said the ute driver even deliberately stayed put to block the EV charging bay
‘Then he stayed in the car deliberately.’
Eventually, after 40 minutes, Mr Tootooni said the ute left but not without the driver hurling more abuse at him from the moving vehicle.
Mt Tootooni said he had previously asked other motorists to free the EV bay without incident but this time he was met with aggression and refusal.
In NSW there are laws against parking a combustion engine vehicle in a designated charging bay and doing so can attract a fine of up to $2,200.
In Queensland, it could cost you $55 and in Victoria, the minimum penalty is $99.