Brazilian Thieves Try To Put Gas In Electric Car And Get Arrested

If opportunity makes the thief, it can also put them in jail if they do not know their goods well.

Any police officer will tell you that thieves are lazy people in search of the easiest target around. Some are also pretty stupid, as you will see in the video above. It shows crooks trying to fill up an electric car at a gas station in Brazil last May 26. The black JAC iEV40 was stolen in Curitiba, Paraná, and finally recovered in Garuva, Santa Catarina, 99.2 km (61.6 mi) away.

The video was released by the Polícia Rodoviária Federal, or PRF – something like Federal Highway Patrol. It shows one of the two thieves and the EV parked beside a gas pump. The guy with the grey shirt is the gas jockey – in Brazil, all gas stations still require these workers. The bandit is the man in the yellow hoodie.

The video reveals they move around the car for a long time, trying to find the gas tank cap. At some point, they pop the hood to check the engine. When they do so, we can hear the gas jockey and a police officer comment that the car had a “100 percent electric” sticker there.

Gallery: Unaware Stolen Car Was An EV, Brazilian Thieves Try To Put Gas In It And Get Arrested


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The PRF officer confesses he did not know there were pure electric cars for sale in Brazil. They are relatively new in that country. The BMW i3 is available there since 2014, but initially only in the REx version. The first EV without any sort of combustion engine assistance there was the Renault ZOE, sold since November 2018, but first-delivered in April 2019.