A Tesla owner in Shanghai took to local social media website Weibo to complain about a charging bill he recently received. More specifically, they were charged 3,846,306 Chinese Yuan ($608,515) to charge their vehicle!
The user, @滤镜粉碎机, posted their charging history, which shows that on that day they somehow ran through the 2,285 km (1,420 miles) of free charging time they had amassed through a Tesla incentive scheme, and used a total of 1,923,720 kWh at a rate of 2 CNY ($0.32) per kWh.
As cnevpost.com reports, that would be enough to fill the 60 kWh pack on the entry-level Tesla Model 3 more than 32,000 times, which would obviously be impossible to do.
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Fortunately, Tesla’s customer service told the outlet that the charge was an error and that there was a fault in the back-end system of some vehicles that was being worked on by its technicians.
Although the cause of the issue remains unknown, Tesla has been working to raise its idle fee in China. It says that the move is being made to improve the utilization of charging stalls. The new fee in China is 3.20 CNY ($0.51) per minute but rises to 6.40 CNY ($1.01) if all the stalls are full, which has led to some grumbling among Tesla owners in the country.
China is the world’s number one market and, thus, very important for Tesla and, indeed, most manufacturers. Just this weekend, China’s ambassador to the U.S. took a trip to Tesla’s plant in Fremont, California. According to the ambassador’s Twitter account, he had an “inspiring talk” with Elon Musk and took a ride in the Tesla Model S Plaid.
