It was a vehicle so festive it could have almost been Santa’s sleigh. There was just one problem: it wasn’t legal.
But the Victorian highway patrol officers who pulled over the driver of the particularly Christmasy BMW on Melbourne’s Monash freeway decided to give him an early present, giving him a warning rather than a $790 fine and a defect notice.
Prahran highway patrol officer Sen Con Josh Scarcella said he was targeting speeding drivers heading towards the city with his colleague when they spotted the BMW about 1am on 30 November.
“He was Chapel Street-bound, as they all are,” Scarcella said.
The driver wasn’t speeding, but the officers considered the vehicle defective because of its potential to seriously distract other road users. As well as the hefty fine, it would have resulted in the driver having to attend VicRoads to prove it was no longer defective after the lights were removed.
“He said ‘I’ve been waiting for this to happen, to see how I go’, or something along those lines,” Scarcella said.
“They [the driver and passenger] were both in good spirits, we had a laugh with them.”
Scarcella said that about 1,000 pieces of tape were used to fix the lights to the car. It was running a dual battery system, with a 240 volt inverter and an extension lead being used to power the lights.
While police ordered them to take the lights off immediately, the pair couldn’t do it: the tape was so strong that it would have damaged the paint, so they told Scarcella they had to go home to use a heat gun in order to remove it.
Scarcella told them to send him a photo with the lights removed from the car within 24 hours, and let them go.
He confirmed his decision was motivated by the spirit of the season, and not the industrial action being undertaken by police in the state.
“It was more education piece for them, having those lights on a freeway is a bit of a distraction,” Scarcell said.
“They sent me a selfie about an hour later of them pulling them all off.”
