A driver in the UK fights a parking charge for three years with help from ChatGPT and the company drops it
IA en un minuto newsroom · Editor: Jon Elgezabal
In 30 seconds
Rafal Goral, 45, from Essex, no longer owes a parking charge of 100 pounds after three years of letters, debt collectors and a looming court date. He says he drafted every reply, and even his court defense, by asking ChatGPT. Smart Parking dropped the claim before the hearing without giving a reason, so no ruling says who was right.
Rafal Goral, a 45-year-old refinery worker from Chelmsford, Essex, in the United Kingdom, says he is free of a 100-pound parking charge after a three-year dispute in which he checked every step with ChatGPT, the assistant from OpenAI. He told his story to "Sell Us Your Story", as reported by The Independent on Friday, October 9.
It started on August 4, 2023, at the Tower Road pay and display car park in Newquay, Cornwall, where he arrived at around 10:12 a.m. By his account, there was a long queue at the machine, which was only accepting cash, and he had to download the RingGo payment app and set up an account with poor signal. The charge notice from Smart Parking, the company that manages the car park, is dated August 25: 100 pounds. According to Goral, the letter said he had paid 16 minutes after driving through the entrance; the reason listed was insufficient time paid.
Goral appealed. He says he heard nothing until January, when a letter arrived from a debt collection company asking for 170 pounds. After four months of back and forth with it, the case was put "on hold" and he heard nothing for a year and a half. In November 2025 a different debt collection company wrote to him, and he was then told the case would go to court in October 2026. By then the amount was around 300 pounds. A mediator was involved and Smart Parking allegedly offered to lower it to 60 pounds, which he refused.
Throughout that time he uploaded every letter and email to ChatGPT and asked what to reply. "From start to finish I was asking ChatGPT every time I got a letter what to do. It was telling me what to say, where to go, and everything," he says. He adds that the AI also prepared the defense he sent to the court, and that he called the Citizens Advice helpline, a citizens' advice service, a few times but found it less helpful. He maintains it was never about the money, which he could pay, but about the principle.
On September 25, weeks before the court date, he received an email saying that the case and the charge had been dropped. There was no trial and no ruling. "I won the war without the final battle," he says.
Smart Parking stands by its version. A spokesperson told the Manchester Evening News that Goral paid for four hours of parking through RingGo and stayed on site for over four hours and 11 minutes, so the charge was correctly issued, and that he could have topped up his payment in the app. The spokesperson added that the company checked the payment machines, that they were working and were used by numerous other motorists that day, and that this is why it rejected the appeal and passed the matter on to debt recovery. That statement does not explain why the claim was dropped.
The headlines say ChatGPT acted "as his lawyer". What Goral describes is that the tool helped him answer letters and prepare his defense. It is one person's account: neither of the two reports says what weighed in the company's decision.
Why it matters · analysis and opinion
The headline sells a courtroom win, and what actually happened is a company backing down before the hearing without giving reasons. That does not show the assistant got the law right, or even that its help was the deciding factor: perhaps it simply stopped being worth it for the company to press on against someone who answered every letter and was ready to turn up. The case does show a very specific, unglamorous use of these tools: sorting paperwork, understanding what each letter is asking for and writing a reply on time, exactly the part that makes many people give up. Goral himself says the advice service he called was less useful. Trusting it blindly is another matter: the story does not say anyone checked what the machine proposed, and no judge ever read it.
Source: The Independent · Written with the help of AI: how we make the news
