I thought these Teslas had like an auto warming feature to warm up the batteries?
That's the essential reason for the scale of the incidents in Chicago. The battery preconditioning (warming) process for decent charge rates has to be manually initiated 20-30 minutes prior to charging and by itself eats 10 miles of range.
The public charging infrastructure in Chicago is pretty limited relative to the number of EVs. Add this weeklong Arctic blast really hurting the EVs capacity and recharge rate. Hardly any Tesla owners were doing charge preconditioning and many didnt even know about it, waiting in line with near-dead cold batteries for people trying to charge cold batteries. A Perfect Storm of conditions for a battalion of tow truck rescues for dead Teslas that spent their last energy waiting on poor *******s that were only getting a few kW of charge... a domino effect.
Of course, severe weather always generates the most hyped up media coverage of its effects. So the dead Tesla "event" was reported with typical exaggerated drama. But is is a glaring issue that highlights the insufficiency of public charging infrastructure. Until access to charging is remotely comparable to the convenience of finding a gas station the present EV situation has more (significant) drawbacks than benefits.
Battery technology in EVs, like solid state cells and alternate chemistries are still in a rapid evolutionary stage. What we have available now makes EVs possible but quite a long way away from being ready for prime time and scaled up to huge numbers. They are certainly impractical in many ways right now, and at their worst in below freezing weather.