Evolving Supercharger Pricing

This is long overdue. I understand for the need for congestion pricing at busy stations, but not when there are several vacant stations.

The most logical option is having the price divided into two: 1. electricity charge, fixed cost of kwh or dynamic price according to electricity cost. 2. Congestion charge, based on time. The average total cost can be similar to today. This will automatically encourage charging until 80%, discourage slow charging cars from hogging the charger to get a funny amount of charge. It also provides clarity on the exact sum I would save if I acted differently, perhaps charge off peak to avoid that charge completely.

as much as I’m not a fan of the brand right now they’re gonna have to pry my free unlimited supercharging model 3 from my dead hands

💀

Surge pricing is a money grab, nothing else.

What year and how did you get the unlimited charging?

Yup. A whole lot of words to say "We want more money".

So surge pricing… got it.

2018 and it transferred from my original model S

I just want to know where you're getting $0.59/kwh as _surge pricing_. (Cries in traveling between SoCal and Vegas)

Where I live it's 40cents 24/7

Well it's about* to be 40 cents except when it's 80.

1.) open supercharger network to other brands 2.) increase prices because of “congestion” 3.) profit!

My closest station recently went to off peak/on peak a couple months ago. Between 11pm and 8am it's 19c. Regular hours it's 32 cents. I have 2 other stations near me that have a static rate. One is like 35 cents and the other is 45 cents. That last one is typically always packed which creates a lot of problems during the winter.

I have NEVER seen the price before charging. I always have to dig in the app for it after the fact. Where do I find this magical number after I park and am about to get out and plug in?

You think they’re running a charity? It’s a for-profit business, that’s how businesses work.

It's good that they changed the context of how they measured their goals. They only measured success with 3 bumbers. Off-peak X On-peak / Did we make a profit? = Yeah we did it right. Sort of the issue with how Highways do math. They do not care how bad the experience is. Only if X millions of cars got through before 9pm.

wow EDIT: lol Tesla shills should be on X

Also curious…

Posts like this always make me think back to when people said that supercharger expansion was going to stop because the entire supercharger network team was fired. I guess they either weren’t (at least not all of them) or they found other people to do the work. Either way, I’m seeing superchargers going up everywhere.

Hit the charging station button on the nav map.

The what? Oh wait. I think I know what you mean. I will try that on the next trip. I have seen it list prices when I search for an SC. Never thought to click the tiny AF icon on the map when I park. LOL

This is cool. Prices reflecting actual grid usage are great for stabilizing the grid and allowing increased use of renewables.

Surge pricing should be illegal.

Hopefully non native vehicles are charged at a higher rate.

Same with my wife's Model S. I'm looking for a used Model X with free supercharging now. I hate paying on my Model 3 on upwards of $0.50/kWh at 8am.

Maybe It was A Mistake to Open Up the Super Charging Network.

Fake news

Charging a Chevy Bolt on a 250kW charger until 80% should be illegal, if there's no spots available/ line. And that's coming from a previous Bolt owner.

selling lemonade is a money grab

I have two super chargers near me. One has 8 spots what charges extremely fast. The other has about 25 that charges extremely slow. It’s always empty because how slow it charges

Crazy how slow Bolt DC charging is; it’s otherwise a decent, basic EV but god help you if need to road trip

So you’d absolutely be cool with going to Starbucks and they say sorry we’re busy, your drink is now $10?

This!

How come I can't zoom in on images on the phone app any more? I don't understand.

Tesla lowers car price. “Their margin is collapsing. Tesla is going outta business.” Tesla poses supercharging price. “How dare you?”

They are trying to prevent supercharging lines at busy chargers by disincentivizing people from staying unnecessarily. Think about a full super charger and a bolt is taking up a spot It just happens to also come with the advantage of making them more money

Is because Tesla hired the supercharger team back: https://fortune.com/2024/05/13/tesla-supercharger-workers-rehired-elon-musk-layoff-entire-team-max-dezegher/

It would be interesting if the cost increased as the charging rate decreased. This would help deter the slower charging Bolts from sitting there for an hour.

I would agree with you but most of the time surge pricing is during the day when there is solar on the grid. It would be an interesting thought if Tesla could contact the local power companies and increase the fee based on the amount of fossil fuels being used at that time compared to their cleanest times.

Double tap the image first, then after that you can pinch-to-zoom

They couldn't just limit by time?

Are they V2 chargers? Honestly on a busy day, I'd rather take more 120 kw plugs than less 250 kw plugs. Especially if there are more than 4x the plugs! The battery's charging curve means that the difference in charging speed isn't much different anyways!

I don't think a limit is a good idea. After the limit they could just unplug and plug back in. What if someone actually needs the charge to get to the next charger or their destination and back! If people don't want to pay more they can go to a different charger or wait for it to be less occupied.

Tbh idr which ones they are but my god they’re slow. A lot of people just avoid them entirely. If they are fast it would help so much in the area

Works for me.

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They let you transfer it!? That’s wild

they ran a special offer to help sales etc

I don't want you to dox yourself but if you're willing can you tell me where they are?

they're all lubed up.

Yea business should just be nice. They are just pointing out how dumb the term money grab is.

I wonder how long this was delayed by the firing of the supercharger team

I’ve been waiting 4 years for them to put something in the >120-mile gap on I-75. I remember a time I arrived at a charger when it was full, and by the time I was charged enough to go everyone else had left except the one vehicle (that I was sharing 150kW with). Now if that happens, I’ll have to pay more that whole session, even after it mostly clears up?

Yeah I watch supercharge.info pretty closely and never noticed a dip. New construction and openings are happening just as often as ever before, if not more often. The media loves to sensationalize stuff.

No it’s not cool.

It's station specific. I've seen 2 chargers in the same town, a few miles apart, where one is a flat rate 24/7 and the other has on peak and off peak rates

Why is this seen as a challenge as to who can be the biggest asshole?

I just want my 2019 supercharger prices back. None of this “30% cheaper than competitors” - take a flat % profit and communicate that. Commuting is still cheap as hell since i charge at home for $0.12/KwH but road trips are barely worth it in my Tesla anymore.

They already are

It’s just an unethical pro tip to avoid surge pricing

I was able to transfer both free unlimited supercharging *AND* FSD from my 2018 X to a 2023 X. Have to keep an eye out for their incentives, usually the best are in Q4.

I prefer surge pricing to lines.

I’d also like to see them force what stalls they can goto. The other week I had to wait to charge cause 3 different rivians were spaced out so they were practically blocking 6 stalls. When if they were parked next to each other. It would’ve only taken 4 stalls.

Yup the goal of any business is to make money and stay in business.

Non-Teslas causing congestion has to be very rare. I road trip a lot and never wait to charge...

They hired roughly 15% of the team back, now running a skeleton crew and now selling the chargers outright. They've heavily shifted out of their pace. The article is wrong. Edit: i read the first paragraph of that source and almost every word is wrong lol. That's insane

Of course if a supercharger (not v4 stalls) has a bunch of alternating Teslas and Rivians then it will not be considered congested as 1/3 of the spots are unavailable. (The Rivian's charge port is on the other side).

"unethical" = "being an asshole"

That’s amazing, I feel like they should just keep FSD transfer open forever. Especially for hw3 folk moving to hw4

They had to hire a ton of them back immediately

Anyone else take issue at what they claim to be 'first' in. Idle fees, um a lot of network operators were doing those before 2017. Glad mine is free otherwise I'd never use a SpC

The problem (for me) is that Tesla opened up the supercharger network for other vehicles in Europe. They might do that for cars with the charging port at the same side but most of the times the cars have the charging port on their right side or in the front blocking 2 (or more) stalls. Or a 250kwh stall where the car can only charge 150kwh for example. This needs to be fixed.

If the opposite ran true and I got a discounted price by avoiding the morning rush, then sure.

Supercharger prices have almost doubled here (Finland) and electricity price is one of the cheapest in EU, often close to zero. Havent used them in over year and rarely see anyone charging. Maximum number I’ve seen closest station to me is one car charging. I’ve wondered why they do not adjust at all, is no sales really better than some sales with more reasonable price. Checked from the app out of curiosity. Not a single charger reserved at the moment. It is morning commute time.

I'm sure once you lock in at a price it doesn't go up for you as long as you already started a charge.

Starbucks actually does often offer discounted/free drinks for afternoon purchases!

Considering the team seems to be executing better now than before the firing, if anything the shakeup probably sped this up, rather than delaying it.

Increased utilization actually lowers prices for you, because fixed costs can be spread out over more vehicles.

Yup, people always overreact and never correct their analysis to acknowledge the fact that Elon is (generally) an excellent leader and produces excellent results. People thought the world was ending, but now they're opening more Superchargers than ever before, with a much more efficient team. You'll never see them admitting they were wrong though.

Yes, which is good.

Incorrect. It's simply more efficient pricing. You don't need surge pricing to charge higher prices. In fact, surge pricing can have lower prices on average than flat pricing.

Why? It's literally just better. You must think it causes higher prices. That's incorrect. If surge pricing was illegal, a company could just charge the highest price at all times if they wanted to. How does that benefit the consumer?

https://x.com/TeslaCharging/status/1919831219061325871

> when there is solar on the grid That's what Megapacks are for. Currently ~10GWh deployed. For comparison, Nuclear produces about 10GW. And the Shanghai Megapack factory is reportedly able to produce another 20-40GWh of storage every single year for years and years to come.

Sorry, this is a step too far. They don't do this at gas stations. If they did there would be a riot. Why do EV drivers get hit with this? Will you have to pay more because half the chargers are broken etc. This is taking a big chunk of spend predictability away from tesla drivers.

> We aim to remain more cost-effective than gasoline for equivalent gas-powered vehicles. This hasn’t been consistently true for a while. By me during the day, it’s $.48 per kWh. If I charged my Model 3 from 0-100 at that rate, it would cost me $38, and I’d get 300 miles. Right now, gas by me is $2.90 a gallon. For $38, I could get 13 gallons of gas. You only need to get 23 mpg to beat a Tesla supercharger in value with a gas car. Granted, my home electricity rates are much cheaper and I very rarely use a supercharger, but it’s funny for them to word it how they did when it’s already frequently cheaper to drive a gas car than to supercharge.

> They don't do this at gas stations. Gas pumps are much faster to deliver gas, and the price of the gas itself vastly dominates the costs. In the case of a supercharger the price of the electricity is a relatively small slice of the costs and you need far more superchargers to handle the same number of cars over time. It's a different model entirely.

Yes the model is different but they should have done this years ago, not now. Especially now, when tesla are in the news for all the wrong reasons and they are choosing now to diminish one of the few USPs they have left in this hyper competitive market. I can also see government intervention on it, imagine plugging in to the last charger, paying $1 per kWh and still paying it when the other chargers free up and the next guy to plug in gets 20 cents? What about the other way around, does the price go up whilst you are connected? Either way someone is getting screwed. This sadly, makes my decision on what to replace my ‘22 MYP with much harder.

> I can also see government intervention on it, imagine plugging in to the last charger, paying $1 per kWh and still paying it when the other chargers free up and the next guy to plug in gets 20 cents? I mean, first, you chose to pay $1/kWh. Second, If you want to check your app and find a cheaper charger, go for it, nobody's going to stop you. Third, it's *extremely* unlikely that they will swing the prices that hard within a single charge. > What about the other way around, does the price go up whilst you are connected? The *single image linked* says explicitly that this doesn't happen; prices don't change mid-session.

Check the supercharger community on the other social media network. Someone posted a picture where the price went up 25% when a site went from 10 available chargers to 9. 36 cents to 45. At that rate, could be welll over a dollar by the time there was only one left.

They could do that very differently. Didn’t pre-condition? 10% higher cost etc. can’t charge at the speed available from the charger. 10% cost. Etc.

He lives in Miami and the very specific amounts of chargers in approximately the same spot/combination should be easy to find.

But doing this to one of their best usp’s when their car sales are struggling for various reasons smacks of incompetence, desperation, and/or arrogance.

A good start. It would be even more effective to charge a per minute surcharge (or per kWhr surcharge) to anyone charging slower than 50 KW. You're full, move along. Oh, you want to stay longer? Ok, but it's going to cost you a premium for the privilege. Electrify America could basically solve all their congestion by doing this.

How come Reddits pinch-to-zoom also closes the picture 85% of the time?

Okay, so I'm not alone lol.

I wish they would open the supercharger by my house its been built for like 8mos and hasn't been brought online yet. I have a wall connector at my house but some days we drive around a lot and then go to rural parts of the state and need the extra boot.

That would make things very confusing to know how much the charge would cost. You wouldn't know until after it finished charging. With surge charging you'd have an idea People would be pulling in way too close to 0% just to get there at the magical 7% on a model 3/Y. It would result in people being stranded on the road if the wind direction changed You'd also be penalized for charging to 100% before a road trip if you can't quite make it to a super charger with 93%-100% charge. You'd have to bail out to the next closest charger. You don't want people discouraged from home charging!

Well like Tesla stated in the announcement, four states, Michigan, Nebraska, Tennessee, and Wisconsin, do not permit charging by kWh leaving charging companies no real option but by time. I end up on my I75 trips trying to skip Tennessee which means charging early in Georgia to have enough to get into Kentucky. Meaning Adairsville Ga to London KY which is 221+ miles. Now that might not be sensible as I have not recently sat down and determined if the timed rate in TN is cheaper than by kWh elsewhere.

Not every car charges as the same speed.

Rationing supply of essential goods and services (transportation, healthcare, food) on your ability to pay is unjust and inefficient. Surge pricing is anticompetitive and in effect nothing more than price fixing which is already illegal. The courts simply need to define it as such. “Your ER bill is $5k because your insurance only covers off peak pricing!” “I was offered a new job but I was late and let go on my first day because I couldn’t afford peak price bus fare!” “I was diagnosed with hypertension because I have to choose between peak price transportation to work and peak price groceries. I can’t afford peak price vegetables!”

How slow is slow? In Europe at least, I read that when the cable cooling is broken, the chargers limit themselves to 30-ish kW…

Are you measuring utilization by kWh delivered or number of cars in stalls? I think utilization is measured by kWh delivered or by revenue. If your congestion charge is insufficient at a busy time then you gain income from people moving a charged car away. If your congestion price is too high when it isn't full you gain money from keeping people there. This is course ignores the long term cost of making people queue. Causing people to occasionally wait to charge gets blown up online into a mess. People who watch the wrong news sources online have only ever seen videos of 100+ cars lined up at superchargers and think that is the typical experience so they shouldn't buy an EV.

Probably the urban 72kw superchargers

I am a wife with a free charging model S (though I am not *your* wife with a free charging Model S) and you better believe we baby our sweet old girl with her real dashboard and her lovely long-ways screen.

Oh okay that would make more sense then. I was thinking 120 kw doesn't really make that big of a difference. 75 kw is pretty slow for a road trip charger but is still the perfect speed for the grocery store or the mall

The free supercharging doesn't transfer with the vehicle. It stays with the owner. I sold my free supercharging X back to Tesla and transferred it to a new X. This was a promotion they ran last year.

It transfers with the vehicle as long as the vehicle doesn't sell to tesla first and the owner didn't take advantage of said promotion last year. As of right now until the promo comes back the supercharging is tagged to vehicle not to owner

The cost of being who they are

Yeah, but for like 12 bucks a month non Tesla’s can access Tesla pricing. Basically free and doesn’t incentivize finding or advocating for alternatives

They do that when they get desperate to move units.

I miss the 2019 prices here in California. I was paying on average about $0.25 per kilowatt. Now I'm paying on average about $0.58 per kilowatt during peak time and if I can wake my butt early and charge before 8:00 a.m. then it would be $0.30. it makes no sense for me to charge at home since PG&E likes to rape me. I pay $0.47 per kilowatt after midnight to 4:00 p.m.. then peak time is from 4:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. And I pay $0.68 per kilowatt. And then from 9:00 p.m. to midnight at semi peak time. And I pay $0.54 per kilowatt.

Yea my wife doesn't like driving my 3.

We had a newish 3 as a loaner for a minute last fall and oooh yeah. I didn’t love it. I get why some people don’t.

Now charge non Teslas a higher premium than they do now - especially the ones that need to hog two spots.

No the rates are still higher even with the membership. “Basically free” is a joke it costs almost as much as gas

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That's fair, it could be convenient to plan for a lunch or dinner spot. Never thought about that. Wish more restaurants had 48 amp charging.

yup, I transfered my FSD from my 2018 Model S and my SC01 (unlimited supercharging) from my 2015 Model S all to my 2024 Model X (bought new from Tesla) as part of a first quarter promotion they were running

Same here. If they did supercharging + fsd + data transfer and had v2l I would buy a model y juniper tomorrow.

I was given the impression that as soon as you transfer ownership on the tesla app, you lose free supercharging. Your information might be more up to date.

This seems really good. Obviously if they're not being used, prices decreasing is a huge win. But are they going to bump up the current peak price even more since they will set it based on actual usage? Or just cap the peak pricing and decrease it when not being used as much?

It's an uphill battle considering gasoline is extremely heavily subsidized while electricity is not. We pay the real cost of wholesale electricity while tax dollars shave off a portion of gas

.59 p/kw ? that's equal or more than gas now...

Found the Geoguesser player.

I made a post about the change in prices and somebody said prices always change. I knew something was different

Yes it’s more expensive now during on peak hours. But after midnight it’s super cheap. When i first realized the change in off peak prices, I waited until midnight and when i arrived it was full 😂

There are difference categories of free supercharging and some are transferable and some aren’t.

Nooo, Tesla is a company, they have no incentives to lower prices.

How about a way to report people who park in the spot but never hook up to charge?

Pretty much. But it would work to not have surge pricing if they really do implement it.

So there's a station nearby that from 11 PM to 4 AM their rates are lower than rates at home that station is full by 10:45 with everybody waiting to plug-in once 11 o'clock hits. There is normally a queue of about eight cars that will sit there for 20 minutes until people start leaving from that 11 o'clock rush. my guess is that's the busiest time of their day and this change would impact that low cost.

That only kinda works. I can zoom until the width of the picture hits the width of the screen, and then it loads the comments. I can't actually zoom in and read the text.

Right, when you're in that mode, double tap the picture. It should zoom in slightly. Then after that you can zoom more by pinching.

That works! Also, I just found this: [https://www.reddit.com/r/bugs/comments/1kguisc/please\_fix\_this\_android/](https://www.reddit.com/r/bugs/comments/1kguisc/please_fix_this_android/)

I agree as a person who charges 1x-2x and unplugs right before 9am so I don’t get the extra $.20 per kWh. Lol


Good grief. Mine was at $0.27 at nearly 3pm on a Saturday.

Free supercharging on Model S and X up until the Model 3 came out in 2017 has free supercharging for life of the vehicle. Non-transferable. They only opened up transferable free supercharging for sales drives intermittently for pre 2018 models including the performance 3. If the vehicle gets sold back to Tesla they just simply turn it off and sell it as no free supercharging. So you can still find a Q1 2017 Model S or X with free supercharging.

Interesting. I bought mine in 2020 and it came with non-transferable free supercharging.

Yea, that's what I said. After Q1 2017 free supercharging became a demand lever not standard, but they made it non-transferable as a default. That too became a demand lever when trying to increase sales for a particular quarter they'd allow that non-transferable to become transferable for a short time.

Sure. I was agreeing with you in my haphazard way :) Thanks for the history!

I have a Tesla with UNLIMITED Supercharging for LIFE 😉

California: Given how much surplus energy there is during the solar peak, surprised we don’t have better pricing at that interval. Is Tesla mostly deriving energy from state energy providers that in turn do not charge a heavily discounted rate during solar surpluses?

Think they’ll have VPP incentives at the superchargers? If they enable V2H; have vehicles plug in at chargers and dump back into the grid when it needs it?

It’s amazing how much better teslas supercharger network is than all other commercial options - insane.

We need even longer range vehicles so they can skip the congestion at the superchargers. 450 miles to 500 miles can skip the charger to the hotel that they would be staying on their trip and charge there overnight.

their margin is someone else's opportunity... but I doubt they will be competitive for a bit. gotta go ala Prius and install solar panels on your roof and charge yourself / your-own-side-battery

2012 - Q1 2017 Model S and X cars, the free charging is bound to the vehicle and transfers to next owner, option code SC01. Q2 2017 and newer cars that came with promotional unlimited free charging, the free charging is bound to the first ownership so it never transfers, option code SC05. Once that car gets a new owner it becomes a pay per use supercharging car, option code SC04. Tesla has often dangled “transfer promotion” deals to the owners of the original free lifetime charging that is bound to the car so that they can buy a new Tesla and so called “transfer” the free charging. But the new car now gets free charging for first ownership and the old car becomes pay per use, therefore eliminating one from the old free charging for the lifetime of the car fleet. Pretty smart way to thin out the herd! So if these owners keep buying new Teslas via these “free charging transfer” promos, it gives them the appearance that their special cars charge for free for life. They will always be first ownerships that charge for free. However the next owner will be pay per use charging upon the sale of vehicle. Pretty niche marketing! One can join this group at the moment as Tesla temporarily brought back free unlimited charging promotion for new S and X cars right now as we speak. Brand new Model S since end of December 2024, and Model X as of February 2025 all get free unlimited charging for first ownerships.

depends on which supercharging model you have. also if you take advantage of a promoton. sc01 was in cars up to 3rd week of March 2017 as long as car was ordered by dec 2016. sc01 is for the life of the car as long as it wasn't traded back in, totalled and sold through auction. radically modified and tesla removes it( just a few cars). sc05 is the current charging model. stays with car for lifetime or when ownership changes. both of these are eligible for transfers to the purchase of a new tesla when promotions open up. they also become sc05 upon transfer. sc05 can be removed if tesla figures out you use the vehicle for commercial purposes such as uber ride share. sc01 is exempt from this.

No issues there just keep in mind, opening the supercharger network to none Tesla vehicles it’s posing an issue with charging port location on those none Tesla vehicles. Most of them if not all of them have the charging port on the front (driver side) forcing them to take 2 spots in order to charge. Not a big deal for locations with 12-16 chargers but for places like my home with only 4 chargers and no other supercharger within 50 miles it’s not ideal. I hope to see more options for those with none Tesla vehicles and for us Tesla owners learned to count on Tesla’s charging network for our needs. 📐

same

And to add insult to injury... the yearly EV tax when renewing registration......

I’ve done math and for road trips a pickup truck and Tesla are about the same price (considering 70+mph freeway travel).  Pickup gets you there hours and hours faster too without charging stops.

Its worse than you realize... They are still giving Tax credits for EVs... And installing L2 home charging isnt real cheap or an option for everyone. People can do this simple math... To many, if they cant charge and drive an EV cheaper than a comparable gas vehicle, then why freaking buy one? The subsidies help, but without them that would cut hard into EV sales.

One ton? Average weight of 150lbs, so 13,14?

I heard it was over half the original team immediately.

Agree. In my area though, they've lowered rates off-peak, but increased them during the day. Cheaper if you're willing to charge early or late in the day, but more expensive overall all other times.

The Dynamic Pricing structure is the first time I’ve been seriously let down by Tesla. I understand why they rolled it out but it has completely thrown a wrench in how I charge and leads to downright frustration. I used to be able to count on charging my car for a set fee early in the morning. Now I still need to wake up early in the hopes that it won’t be busy only to find out the chargers are packed and I have to pay .50+ when I used to get .30? For the first time ever - one very unhappy Tesla customer here.