From what I heard, a lot of those chargers weren't broken. What happened in Chicago was that Tesla drivers plugged in, and the car didn't immediately start charging because it had to warm the battery first. So they did the universal signal for a broken charger and left the cord dangling rather than hooking it. It then froze.

IIRC on a Tesla the car screen displays that it's warming the battery, but the app on the phone doesn't. The phone screen just says that it's charging with 0 amps.

I've heard of a lot of that happening too. Tesla nav was also reporting a decent number of stalls out of order, so there were some outages as well.

TBH, it sounds like a lot of things going wrong (or even just weird) at once. In every report that I saw, there were at least some cars sitting unplugged in front of stalls with noone in them. Even if those were broken, when they get fixed they might need to tow cars to make them usable again!

You are definitely right though. Someone with a cold soaked battery could easily think the charger isn't supplying current, when it is really just running the battery heater for 30+ minutes first.

> IIRC on a Tesla the car screen displays that it's warming the battery, but the app on the phone doesn't. The phone screen just says that it's charging with 0 amps.

This isn't quite accurate. The Tesla app on iOS at least shows the battery preconditioning.