Your 650 miles run on a six-month clock, not a twelve-month one
Almost every referral page that mentions expiry gives one number: twelve months. That number is correct for Tesla Credits and wrong for the benefit a UK buyer actually receives. Supercharging distance runs on a six-month clock, which halves the time you have to use it.
The two clocks
Tesla Credits: 12 months from the Grant Date. Supercharging miles or kilometres: 6 months from the Grant Date. Same programme, same account, two deadlines. In the UK, the buyer's benefit is the six-month one.
What the Grant Date is, and why it is good news
The Grant Date is the day Tesla posts the benefit to the account. It is not the day you ordered and it is not delivery day. Between order and grant, the app shows the referral as pending.
People read "pending" as time draining away. It is the opposite: the clock has not started. A referral that pends for six weeks has cost you nothing at all, because the six months begin when the miles arrive.
A UK timeline
Suppose the miles are granted on 1 October. They run to 1 April. That window is winter — the worst six months of the year for consumption, and the best six months for a charging allowance to be genuinely useful, because cold weather is when public charging is most likely to be part of a long trip. A grant in April runs to October and covers the holiday season instead.
You do not control which you get: the Grant Date follows settlement, which follows delivery. What you can control is knowing the date, because Tesla's 30-day warning email is the only prompt you will receive, and an expired allowance cannot be reissued.
650 miles, converted into visits
At ordinary Model 3 or Model Y consumption, 650 miles is roughly 150–190 kWh. A typical Supercharger stop adds 30–40 kWh, so the allowance is about four to six sessions. Across six months that is one stop a month — which sounds trivially easy and is exactly why it gets forgotten.
The paradox worth naming
The people for whom free Supercharging sounds most valuable are usually the ones who struggle to spend it. If you have a home charger and cheap overnight electricity, your marginal cost of charging is already low, and using the allowance means deliberately routing through Superchargers on journeys you would have made on home charge. If you cannot charge at home, the allowance disappears by itself inside two months without you changing a single plan.
So the honest advice differs by household. Home charger: plan one long trip early and spend the allowance on it deliberately. No home charger: ignore this page, it will look after itself.
What cannot be done with the allowance
- It cannot be transferred to another person or account.
- It cannot be converted to cash, credits, or anything else.
- It cannot be reissued once it expires — there is no support route back.
- It cannot be spent by a non-Tesla, even at a Supercharger open to other brands. The allowance is drawn down by a Tesla authenticating at the stall, before any payment method is touched.
What extends a deadline
For credits, earning again: a further successful referral extends all credits in an account to 12 months from the newest Grant Date. That is a referrer's mechanism, and it does not apply to a buyer's charging allowance — a UK buyer's 650 miles have one deadline and no extension path.
The one habit
When the miles appear, write the date down and add six months. Two lines in the calendar you actually read. That is the whole defence, and it is worth more than any comparison of referral codes — the codes are interchangeable, the deadline is not.
Next in this series: a practical plan for spending 650 miles, and how to confirm they landed at all.
Pillar: What you get · Related: Route-planning 650 miles before expiry
Your UK Tesla referral code
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Click Open at Tesla first, then configure your car — the benefit is applied automatically before you pay.