I can’t say that I approve of this, or even think it’s actually a good idea, but I have to admit it’s a clever idea. There’s a Jeep owner who attends Texas Southern University in Houston and who, understandably, doesn’t really want to pay the high prices for a campus parking permit. He noticed that EVs get to park for free in the provided EV charging spots. His Jeep isn’t one of the new plug-in Hybrid Jeep 4xes, so it can’t park in a charging spot. Or can it? This dude figured out a way, via the magic of lies.
He posted the whole process on TikTok, with disclaimers that, ha ha, he’s kidding, even though the kidding seems to involve kidding about it for a solid month of parking, at least based on this post from him to the Houston Jeep Freaks Facebook group:
I pixellated out his last name because I’m no snitch.
What our stingy Jeep-owning buddy did here was to go on to Amazon and order a plastic wall dock for a standard J1772 electric car charging plug. People buy these so they have a place to stick their home charging plugs when they’re not in use. The plastic housing the plug fits into looks a lot like an EV charging port.
There’s another example of one. The bit at the top with the four screws is the part we’re interested in here.
So, Leonard mounted that on his jeep with what looks like some adhesive, plugged the charger into the dummy port, and boom, legal-looking parking for his fake EV Jeep.
I checked and, yeah, Texas Southern general parking permits are $US250 ($323) or more, and I can totally sympathise with a broke college kid not wanting to pay that. And, it’s a funny solution.
It’s also kind of a dickhead solution, as there’s a limited number of EV spots and there may be students who actually need to charge their EVs to you know, get back home, and this fake-arse not-EV Jeep is needlessly preventing that from happening because someone’s being cheap.
Also, I don’t think Leonard is the first to come up with this little hack; I found a thread on a Nissan Leaf forum from 2017 where someone was talking about another person who 3D printed a fake charge port to pull off essentially the same stunt.
My advice? Enjoy your chuckle, but spend the money and buy your damn permit like all the other poor bastards have to, and leave the EV plugs for cars that actually make electrical connections with them.
Don’t be too upset, though, Leonard. Your fake Jeep EV conversion isn’t really all that much less sophisticated than the one Jeep themselves made!