Tesla continues to grow at a pace that only a select handful of automakers have been able to experience. Furthermore, the constant advancement of their charging and supercharging network nationwide is rapidly removing range anxiety. Before you know it, driving a Tesla across the country will be every bit as commonplace as doing it with a gasoline vehicle. However, as with all developing technologies, mishaps are a likely occurrence. Usually, though, mishaps don’t charge your customers over half a million dollars. Whoops.

The $610,000 Supercharger bill equates to enough energy to fully charge 32,000 Teslas.

This incident occurred to a Tesla Model 3 owner in China. According to Auto Evolution, the car’s owner states that he last used the Supercharger station he received the bill from at the end of February. Remarkably, he states that he only used the charger for a total of about 20 minutes. Then, a few days after, he received the insane bill totaling 3,846,306 CNY, which equates to about $610,000 USD. Just imagine opening your phone and seeing that kind of number appear on your screen. While it is humorous to most of the world and likely will be to this owner after it’s all resolved, it must have been a legitimately shocking situation.

The worst part of it all is that the owner of this Model 3 had over 1,400 miles of free supercharging available thanks to a 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, still, is the fact that this news came with a notification stating that his vehicle cannot use supercharging as he had an outstanding bill. That has to be frustrating.

Ultimately, after reaching out to Tesla for help, the owner did receive word back stating that there was an error on the back-end of some vehicles causing this issue. This means that this particular owner is not likely the only one with an insane bill.

No way an idle fee ran up this bill!

Recently, Tesla implemented idle fees on the Chinese market. Like in the US, Tesla owners receive a fee per minute for time spent sitting on a charger after their car is full. The rates are 50 cents per minute at a station with empty chargers. Additionally, the fee is one dollar a minute if the charging station is full in the US. Chinese rates are about the same. So, one would need to sit idling at a full station for over 10,000 hours to run up this bill. It’s hard to believe that this Model 3 sat at a full charging station for 60 weeks.

Though Tesla’s rollout of the model 3 has largely been successful, this is certainly not the first issue the entry-level Tesla has run into. That being said, there’s obviously no way this owner or any others actually owe Tesla this money. At least they can take solace in the fact that this is just a temporary issue and not something more devastating long term. 

Hopefully, then, Tesla can entirely resolve this situation. That way, no more Tesla owners will have to be told that they can’t charge until they pay enough money to buy a massive house in Texas.