A Belgian Tesla owner doing the weekly shop has lost the top deck. Carrefour has closed all 18 of its rooftop car parks in Belgium to electric vehicles — seven of them in Flanders — extending nationwide a restriction it first applied at its Kraainem store in late July.
The supermarket is explicit that this is not a verdict on electric cars. It is a verdict on the buildings.
Two reasons, and the second is the interesting one
The first is mass. "Because of their heavy batteries they weigh on average 250 to 500 kilograms more than a comparable car running on fossil fuel," Carrefour spokesperson Mich Vergauwen told VRT. A rooftop deck built decades ago was engineered for the fleet of its day, and a full deck of two-tonne cars is a different load case from the one the structure was signed off against.
The second reason is the one owners rarely think about: what happens if a battery does catch fire. A lithium-ion pack in thermal runaway is not put out so much as cooled, over hours, with a great deal of water. Belgian fire services do this with a dompelcontainer — an immersion container the car is lowered into and submerged. That tactic assumes you can get the container to the car. On a roof you often cannot: the access ramp is too tight, or the loaded container is itself too heavy for the deck.
So the restriction is not really "EVs are dangerous". It is that the standard response to a rare event cannot be executed in that specific place.
What actually changes for an owner
Less than the headline suggests.
| Before | Now | |
|---|---|---|
| Rooftop deck | Open to all cars | Petrol and diesel only |
| Ground-level spaces | Open | Open, and sufficient per Carrefour |
| Charge points | Ground floor | Ground floor — unchanged |
Carrefour's charge points were already installed at ground level, so the one thing an owner might have gone up there for was never up there. The company describes the measure as preventative and says no immediate structural danger has been identified. Its French-language spokesperson Damien Bytebier put it as "above all the configuration of these car parks".
Why this is worth watching rather than shrugging at
The weight gap Carrefour cites is not going away, and a Model Y sits squarely inside the band it describes — close to two tonnes, against a petrol SUV of the same footprint several hundred kilograms lighter. Every legacy multi-storey and rooftop deck in Europe was designed before that was the norm.
Belgium already treats EVs as ordinary cars where it counts, including the road vignette every driver will pay from May 2027. Access rules are the quieter front, and they are decided building by building by owners and insurers rather than by parliaments — which means they arrive without consultation and without a national headline.
Bottom line
One retailer, 18 car parks, and no charge points lost. But it is a concrete instance of a structural problem Europe has not addressed: the cars got heavier and the car parks did not. Expect more signs, not fewer.