A MAN has revealed his fury after being slapped with a £100 parking fine - just for waiting in massive queues to charge his electric car.

Richard Stewart, 64, pulled into Pease Pottage services on the M23 service station to charge his Jaguar I-PACE after dropping off his key worker wife at a hospital.

As he pulled up to the two electric charging points he discovered that two other drivers had recently arrived and just began charging their motors.

The pest control company boss decided he would wait it out as he was picking his wife up after she had supervised a specialist clinic in a hospital nearby.

Richard then went for a coffee while the other motorists were charging before returning to his electric car and plugging in.

He says that he waited 50 minutes alone to even get on a charging point.

When he finally managed to plug in, Richard only took 70 minutes to charge his car before driving off to meet his wife.

But Richard was then stunned days later when he received a parking fine showing he had arrived at the parking point at 11.44 am and left at 14.06, taking him 20 minutes over the two hour limit in operation at the service station.

He says that as well as the two cars on the charging point there were four or five cars waiting behind him in the queue.

He said: "They want everyone to go electric and then you get penalised. I've tried to do the right thing but even that isn't good enough, it seems.

"It takes around 70 minutes to charge and some cars take longer than that I think. If you get there just as someone else is plugging in and wait they you are there for more than two hours.

"It did not even occur to me to time myself and basically this is a penalty on all EV drivers that need to recharge their cars.

"If EV`s are going to become more necessary, then why should we be charged twice to recharge them? Someone like the transport minister needs to address this issue.

"I have since learned that quite a few people have been caught like this at service stations and been fined.

"Big cars also take a long time to charge which they haven't taken into account."

Richard decided to appeal the parking fine to Moto who own the service station and has been successful after the firm backed down.

A Moto spokesperson said: “We apologise to the customer for the inconvenience caused and are reviewing our internal processes. We have ensured that their fine has now been cancelled.”

Richard had travelled 75 miles from his home in Beenham, Berks, to Sussex to drop his wife off, making the charging of his car essential for the journey home. 

He added: "I don't regret buying the car because of the way fuel has gone.

"The government have been harping on about electric cars but are not doing enough about the infrastructure."

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