Road rage tends to happen on, you know, the road, but sometimes the anger doesn’t stop when the wheels do. There are lots of people who park their car only to return to find it has been intentionally keyed or dented. In these cases, they usually don’t have much recourse to claim damages – even if they manage to retrieve CCTV footage from the carpark operator.
A similar situation happened to TY Tai on Sunday, according to a Facebook post that has gone viral. In it, he stated that a passer-by kicked his Tesla Model 3 while it was parked at Nexus in Bangsar South. The vandal, who appeared to be with their parents, then turned around to spit on the car before leaving with the family in a white Audi Q8 e-tron.
The incident was captured by both the Sentry Mode on Tai’s Model 3, as well as Nexus’ own security footage. It’s not clear whether the miscreant was unhappy with this particular car, the Tesla company as a whole or Tai himself, and Tai doesn’t seem to know either the vandal or their parents. In any case, the owner did make a police report, but as there was no visible damage, the authorities decided not to open a case file.
This is obviously an unsatisfactory ending for Tai, who resorted to encouraging the culprit to come forward and apologise by promising to delete the post if they do. That’s hardly any motivation for the vandal to do so, especially given that they are not being chased by law enforcement, only hounded on social media.
It may surprise you to know this, but there aren’t actually any laws against vandalism in Malaysia – at least, that’s what Alliance for a Safe Community Lee Lam Thye wrote on The Sun just that Sunday. If his name sounds familiar, that’s because Lee was previously the chairman of the Malaysian Institute of Road Safety Research (MIROS).
Malaysia does have the capacity to punish those who cause mischief under the Penal Code Section 425, but this only applies to those who have actually caused tangible damage – which, again, Tai could not prove. As for existing Kuala Lumpur City Council (DBKL) bylaws, these only apply to city property.
Lee proposed an anti-vandalism law that would impose mandatory community service on convicted vandals and a jail term for repeat offenders. Until such a law passes, however, there’s not much that victims like Tai can do apart from publicly naming and shaming the culprit.
The lesson here is clear – this country needs to enact anti-vandalism laws to curb the prevalence of such acts. But really, do us Malaysians need the law or stringent enforcement to stop us from being a public menace? No matter what you feel about a car or its driver, you shouldn’t take out your frustrations on someone else’s property; that much should be obvious enough. If anything else, know that if you try to do something to a Tesla, you could end up having your face plastered across social media for the world to see.
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Typical audi drivers