Delivery day: confirming your 650 Supercharging miles actually landed
Delivery day is busy, slightly overwhelming, and hostile to detail — which makes it a poor place to discover that a referral benefit is missing. Ten minutes of deliberate checking, most of it before you leave home, is the whole job.
Step 1 — before you travel: read the order summary
Open the order in the Tesla app and look at the summary you agreed to. The referral benefit — for a UK Model 3 or Model Y, roughly 650 free Supercharging miles — should be visible as an included line.
This single check sorts you into one of two situations, and they need completely different responses:
- The line is there. The referral attached. If the miles do not appear on the account, that is a delivery problem with documentation behind it, and it is raisable.
- The line was never there. The referral did not attach at checkout, and it cannot be added after an order is placed. Knowing this before you travel saves a frustrating conversation with someone who has no power to fix it.
Step 2 — at handover: check the account, not the car
A charging allowance is account state rather than a feature in the vehicle, so there is no software screen in the car that displays it the way an FSD trial would. Look in the Tesla app, in the section that shows your Supercharging balance or referral rewards. What you want to see is a balance with a date attached.
That date is the Grant Date, and it is the number to write down: the miles run six months from it, not twelve. If the balance is not there yet, that is normal — a referral shows as pending until the transaction settles, and the clock has not started.
Step 3 — write the expiry date down
Add six months to the Grant Date and put it in the calendar you actually read. Tesla sends a 30-day warning email before the allowance lapses, and that email is the last prompt you will get. An expired allowance cannot be reissued.
Step 4 — only then, the ordinary inspection
Panels, paint, tyres, charge port, boot floor, the usual. Physical faults are permanent and matter more than a software entitlement — but they are also the part every delivery checklist already covers, and none of them have a deadline you can miss without noticing. The referral check goes first precisely because it is the one nobody prompts you about.
What is not your job today
The referrer's side. Whether their credits have been granted, when their Grant Date fell, and what the balance came to are questions for their account. Nothing you do or fail to do at handover changes it, and the two halves of the programme resolve independently.
If the benefit is missing and the order summary showed it
Collect four things before you write to anyone: a screenshot of the order summary showing the benefit line, the order number, the delivery date, and a screenshot of the account showing no allowance. Then ask the narrow question — "my order summary shows the referral benefit; it is not on my account; can you apply it" — rather than the broad one. Narrow questions with evidence attached route better.
If it is missing and the summary never showed it
Two routes remain, and they are genuinely useful rather than consolation. A future energy purchase is a separate transaction and carries its own referral opportunity. And a second vehicle later is unaffected — there is no per-buyer limit on using a referral link. What is not available is retrofitting this order, and being told that plainly is more use than being given hope.
The order of operations, compressed
Read the order summary at home. Check the account balance at handover. Write down the Grant Date plus six months. Then inspect the car. See also the six-month clock and the cutoff moment.
Pillar: What you get · Related: The exact cutoff moment for a UK referral link
Your UK Tesla referral code
steven787345
Click Open at Tesla first, then configure your car — the benefit is applied automatically before you pay.