I was reminded of this when I read a “Shower thoughts” post about clocks.
Where I live, there usually is free parking outside of stores and malls, but limited to a short time, such as 15 minutes or a couple of hours. People have parking discs that they rotate to show when they arrived, and put the discs up visible behind their windshields in their cars.
I have an automatic parking timer displayed in my windshield, that shows the time when I parked rounded up to the nearest half/whole hour. It’s a ”set and forget” thing, which auto adjusts to daylight savings. However, it speeds up 1 - 2 minutes a week, which I didn’t see as it rounds up the time, but I found out after a few months.
Once after parking, I took a quick dash into the store, took maybe 5 minutes. When I got back I had received a fine for the equivalent of 80 € for ”parking for 23 hours in a 2 hour spot”. They apparently don’t have to wait five minutes to write out the ticket if the parking timer was so off.
I didn’t contest the ticket, I considered it a learning experience and a reminder to never blindly trust technology.
The automatic ones have to be approved to be legal, there is a limited set of models that are approved in different countries, and they’re recognizable. Plus, parking attendants can take pictures and see if the car is in the same position with a new time when they pass by an hour later.
However, there exist battery driven parking discs that look like normal manual ones, that you set the time manually and then it adjusts every half hour. These are illegal though, and you’ll get fined and possibly even charged legally for using them if discovered.
It’s also illegal to go back to your car every X hours to move the manual disc time forward if the car isn’t moved.