An electric car in the VvE garage: who gets to charge where?

Arranging a charging point in the garage is one step. The second, which only becomes visible once the charger is actually hanging there, sounds simpler but is harder to solve: who gets to park there, and when. Load management and connection capacity mean that, in practice, a garage often ends up with a handful of charging points for many times that number of owners with an electric car, not a charger at every space.

As long as there are more charging points than cars wanting to charge at the same time, nobody notices. Once that tips the other way, a problem emerges that already has its own name: laadpaalkleven ("charger hogging").

Charger hogging: what the law does and doesn't say

Charger hogging means a car keeps occupying a charging point while its battery is already full. It feels like something that ought to be against the rules, but legally that's not a given: the Dutch Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that charger hogging isn't, by itself, a punishable offence. Anyone who's properly paid for the parking spot can, in principle, stay there all day, even once charging finished long ago. Some charging network operators solve this themselves with a blocking fee: at Allego, for instance, the meter keeps running at €3 an hour once charging stops but the car stays plugged in. See the ANWB's explanation of parking at a charging point for the full legal context.

That ruling concerns charging points on public roads, under a municipal parking ordinance. A VvE garage isn't a public road. It's private property, governed by the association's own house rules. So an association absolutely can set its own rule for how long a car may stay after charging finishes. The issue isn't that such a rule isn't allowed; it's that a rule on paper stops no one if there's no way to enforce it beyond an annoyed neighbour or a note under the wiper.

A rule only works with a system behind it

That's exactly where a bookable space makes the difference. A house rule saying "two hours maximum after charging completes" becomes enforceable the moment it's clear who was parked there and when, and the moment the next resident can automatically claim that space instead of having to go enforce the rule themselves. In LokaalParkeren, an owner can already mark their space as having a charging point. Residents see that immediately as a ⚡ marker among the available spaces, and book it for exactly as long as they need it, not for the rest of the day for lack of any alternative.

For an association with two or three charging points and twenty owners with an electric car, that's the difference between a facility that's a constant source of friction and one that actually turns over. The charging point itself solves the charging problem. Who gets to use it, and for how long, is a separate question. And you don't solve that with a note under the wiper, but with a system that automatically keeps track of whose turn it is.