Tesla continues to grow at a pace that few automakers have been able to experience. Moreover, the continuous advancement of the nationwide charging and supercharging network is rapidly removing scale concern. Before you know it, driving a Tesla across the country will be just as common as doing it with a gasoline-powered car. However, as with all developing technologies, accidents are likely. Usually, though, mishaps don’t charge your customers more than half a million dollars. Excuse me.
The supercharger’s $610,000 bill is equivalent to enough power to fully charge 32,000 Tesla.
This accident happened to the owner of a Tesla Model 3 in China. According to Auto Evolution, the car owner stated that he used the Supercharger station from which he received the bill at the end of February. Remarkably, he mentioned that he only used the charger for 20 minutes. Then, a few days later, he received the crazy bill totaling 3,846,306 CNY, which is equivalent to about 610 thousand US dollars. Just imagine that you open your phone and see this kind of number appear on your screen. While it’s funny to most of the world and likely to have this owner after all, it should be a legitimately shocking situation.
The worst part of all is that the owner of this Model 3 has more than 1,400 miles of supercharged available thanks to the referral program through Tesla. So, not only was he not supposed to be charged $610,000 (obviously), he wasn’t supposed to be charged at all! Perhaps even worse is the fact that this news came with a notice that his car could not use supercharging due to an outstanding bill. It must be frustrating.
Eventually, after reaching out to Tesla for assistance, the owner received a response indicating that there was a fault in the rear end of some of the vehicles causing this problem. This means that this particular owner isn’t likely to be the only one with a crazy bill.
No way idle charges ran this bill!
Recently, Tesla implemented idle fees in the Chinese market. As in the US, Tesla owners receive a per-minute fee for the time they spend sitting on the charger after their car is full. Prices are 50 cents per minute at a station with empty chargers. Additionally, the fee is $1 per minute if the charging station is full in the US. Chinese rates are about the same. Therefore, one would need to sit idle in a full station for more than 10,000 hours to run this bill. It’s hard to believe this Model 3 has sat on a full charging station for 60 weeks.
Although Tesla’s rollout of the Model 3 has been largely successful, this is certainly not the first problem Tesla has encountered for beginners. However, there is clearly no way for this owner or anyone else to actually owe this money to Tesla. At least they can enjoy the fact that this is only a temporary problem and not something more destructive in the long run.
Hopefully, then, Tesla can completely resolve this situation. That way, Tesla owners won’t be told they can’t charge a fee until they’ve paid enough money to buy a huge home in Texas.
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