Kia EV Owner Adds $2 Of Electricity, Gets A Bill For $16,000

Canadian EV owner received a CAD$22,308 bill for charging his Kia EV9.
Invoice says 4.91 kWh was added, which should have cost less than $3.
System seemingly billed for 15 months of charging after a timing glitch.

Public EV charging is expensive compared to juicing up at home, but $16,000 for 4.91 kWh is really taking the electrons. That’s the bill ($CAD22,308) one Canadian Kia owner says he received after a charging session apparently remained electronically open for more than 15 months.

Reddit user IntelliDev posted the incredible invoice more than a year after he’d topped up his EV9 with Hypercharge Networks. It shows the session beginning at 6.57 p.m. on May 17, 2025, but not ending until 1.09 p.m. on August 25, 2026.

The Kia EV9 is among the faster-charging electric cars, capable of swallowing up to 235 kW when hooked up to the right kind of equipment. But if this bill was to be believed, and the EV9 really did need 15 months to chug down just 4.91 kWh, its effective charge rate would have been less than half a Watt per hour. “And I thought my Bolt charged slowly,” one Reddit commenter joked, alluding to the 2017-23 Chevy‘s modest 55 kW rate.

The invoice itself offers a clue besides the price to there being some major mix-up going on here. It says the session “took place in the past on a terminal that was out of communication.” That suggests the actual charging stopped long ago, but the network didn’t receive or correctly process the message telling it the session was finished.

Billed By the Hour

Kia EV Owner Adds $2 Of Electricity, Gets A Bill For $16,000

And because the charger appears to have billed by time rather than electrical units, the meter apparently kept running. At roughly CAD$2 ($1.44) per hour, the elapsed time between those start and finish dates gets you close to the enormous invoice total.

In another glitch, the invoice lists the session duration as only seven days, 18 hours, 12 minutes and 40 seconds, apparently omitting the preceding year and three months even though the billing calculation seems to have remembered them.

IntelliDev said he emailed Hypercharge to dispute the bill but hadn’t received a response at the time of his latest update. We’ve also found nothing suggesting the company has publicly explained what happened yet.