I had rented a Tesla that weekend, first time driving an EV since I drove a a 90s EV conversion Geo Metro and here is my understanding from talking to people an

I had rented a Tesla that weekend, first time driving an EV since I drove a a 90s EV conversion Geo Metro and here is my understanding from talking to people and charging myself. That was a windy and wet storm, lots of deep drifts, road signage covered, etc. now there are quite a few Tesla drivers who are not enthusiasts and don’t know everything about the tech. Issue one: if you don’t precondition the battery it’s going to take a while to warm up before charging, and if you are unfamiliar you may think something is broken, and tell other people a charger is broke when it isn’t. In fact you might even leave the charger hanging to indicate it isn’t working instead of putting it back in its receptacle, causing it to ice over. Issue two: some chargers iced over even when returned to their receptacles properly. Superchargers aren’t new to the Midwest and this was a nasty storm but not something we hadn’t seen before, I don’t think there is some fatal flaw, but idk what the stats are for how many ice up. Issue three: non preconditioned batteries take way longer to charge, lowering the throughput of the chargers that were not (mistakenly or otherwise) broken. Issue four, that I didn’t see anyone on the news talking about: you have to back into superchargers. Snow had drifted against the chargers and backing up into them with a RWD version of a Tesla was real hard. I saw several people struggling with this. My rental was AWD and had no problems. Overall, I’d say I didn’t love the vehicle (AWD model Y) but DC charging was the one thing that really worked well for me, regardless of storm. Before the storm I went 20% to 50% at like 230 kW. That’s fast. I didn’t get that sort of speed during the cold (but I was also on the slower part of the charging curve above 50%) but it still worked well for me.