And you thought you paid a lot for gasoline!
This morning we threw our hands in our heads to learn that there are service stations where filling an average tank of diesel costs up to 113 euros. That is nothing, compared to what this driver must have felt after recharging his electric car and received a bill worth 560,000 euros.
Until recently, Tesla offered its customers in China 1,500 km of free charges on its network of Superchargers (ultra-fast chargers in the country). It was an offer both for clients of the brand and for those who recommended the purchase of any of its electric cars.
The promotion was in force until September 18, but apparently the company informed its customers that they could exhaust the 1,500 km as long as they had purchased the vehicle before that date.
With the increase in electricity, is it more expensive to recharge an electric car or refuel a diesel?
More than 500,000 euros for recharging an electric car
The surprise came a few days ago for a driver from Shanghai (China). As he himself has made public through Weibo, a well-known social network, a few days ago he received a notification from Tesla informing him that he had exhausted his free recharge balance.
The worst was not that. The notice was accompanied by an invoice with an alleged debt that he had to pay if he wanted to continue using the brand’s network of chargers. The big surprise was that the required amount had seven figures in yuan (Chinese official currency) and six in euros: 3,846,306 yuan, which, in exchange, is 560,180 euros.
We reproduce the publication:
The driver explains on the social network that his last recharge on the Tesla network was on February 27. He says that he then did a 20-minute charge and that it was halfway through that operation that he used up his balance. In his notification, Tesla requires him to pay 1,923,720 KWh at a rate of 2 yuan per KWh (that’s where the 3.8 million yuan they ask for comes from).
Obviously, this is a mistake, since no electric car can store such an amount of energy in a single charge. The company has admitted the failure and everything has remained an anecdote but surely the driver is not so amused every time he remembers it.