Driver charged $100k at carpark after just 5 min, gantry says he parked for 7,204 days
A driver who parked at his child’s school in River Valley for only five minutes was told he owed more than $100,000 upon exiting the carpark.
The system showed that his vehicle had been parked for 7,204 days, 22 hours and 51 minutes, with a parking fee that totalled $100,870.
The driver shared the incident on popular subreddit r/Singapore in a post titled “accidentally parked for 20 years”.
Based on the photo in his post, he entered the carpark just before 9am on Sept 25. He said he had parked for only around five minutes — still within the carpark’s grace period.
The driver — whose Reddit username is templar817 — subsequently called the carpark hotline to find out what had happened, and was apparently told that the system had failed to detect the In-Vehicle Unit (IU) in his car when he entered the carpark.
Despite this, the driver said the barrier had opened normally when he entered.
“Lucky it didn’t debit my cash card,” he said in the post.
‘Can you even have that amount of money in your cash card?’
The post has attracted at least 1,500 upvotes and 77 comments.
Many Redditors expressed their bewilderment at the exorbitant parking fee that the driver was told he had to pay, with some questioning if he would even have enough money to foot the bill.
In response to questions about the money in his cash card, templar817 said that he had enabled an automatic top up of $50 to his cash card with his credit card, which would be activated whenever his cash card balance drops to a negative number.
“I didn’t know if it will run infinitely until it hits $100k! Luckily it didn’t,” shared the driver.
“Still cheaper than a COE (certificate of entitlement),” wrote another Redditor.
Several others made light-hearted jokes at the length of time displayed on the parking system.
“(Your) car is a time machine and (you) are 20 years into the future. So, with this knowledge... can you help us take picture of the past decades’ winning numbers for 4D?” joked one commenter.
“Your kid arrived in the car as a kindergarten pupil and left a university student,” added another.
Faulty component replaced
According to a report in Shin Min Daily News, the carpark management confirmed that it was aware of the incident circulating on social media.
A spokesperson said the team was alerted to the issue and immediately sent staff to the site to investigate.
The affected component has since been replaced.
“The issue has been resolved and the vehicle owner did not suffer any loss as a result,” the spokesperson said.
The carpark management apologised for the inconvenience caused and said measures had been taken to rectify the problem.
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