Everybody knows that Chicago is cold, but right now even the most seasoned windy city residents are feeling the chill. From January 14 to 16, Chicago never reached a temperature over five degrees Fahrenheit; something that hasn’t happened over a three-day stretch since 1996. But now, residents are dealing with a problem their 1996 counterparts never had to, dying electric cars.


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Electric car owners flocked to social media this week, sharing their struggles charging in a winter wasteland.


“I made it to Evergreen charging station. Nine or eight of them are all broken,” one woman recounted. “You have people stuck out in negative degrees.” Some commenters even dubbed the scene a “Tesla graveyard.”



Like your phone, most electric cars deal with some degree of range loss due to cold, with AAA claiming that the worst offenders can lose up to 50% with their heaters on full. Ironically, the Norwegian Automobile Federation concluded in a 2019 study that the Tesla Model S only lost 16.4% of its range in below-freezing temperatures, and boasted the highest total cold weather range. However, none of that matters if the Chicago chargers themselves aren’t working.


“I’m literally having to go miles and miles away from my home just to charge my car,” Ms. Iwin Wewin said in a TikTok. “I couldn’t charge up because there were too many cars at the soup.”


Between stranded dead cars and 3-hour-long log jams at charging stations, it’s clear that electric car technology and infrastructure has a ways to go before it can handle a Chicago winter.