Newsroom
Tesla referral news — what changed, and what it means before you order
Short, dated dispatches on the Tesla referral program and the incentives around it — each one says what actually changed and what a buyer should do differently. The blog holds the longer worked math; this is the running record of changes.
- Q2's 480,126 deliveries, measured against the ten-referral cap A cap of ten per calendar year is a per-account limit in a market of hundreds of thousands of orders. The arithmetic is more interesting than it sounds.
- Model Y L at $61,990: the benefit-to-price ratio, calculated One numerator, two denominators, a 1.7× difference. The variant is also the rare configuration change that adds a referral benefit rather than losing one.
- $99 a month: putting a number on three free months of FSD The benefit stopped being a discount on an option and became a trial of a bill. That makes it easy to price and easy to forget to cancel.
- The $49 Enhanced Autopilot rate halves the trial’s value A free trial is worth what you would otherwise have paid. For one group of owners, that is half of what every referral page quotes.
- 80,000 stalls: what network growth does to a charging reward A distance-denominated reward expires in six months and can only be spent at stalls. Coverage is therefore an input to its value, not background colour.
- The 2026 price ladder, from $36,990 to $61,990 Five prices, one fixed benefit. The spread between top and bottom is what decides whether $297 is a rounding error or a real line item.
- The Self-Driving app is where a free trial gets cancelled A three-month trial of a $99 subscription has an end date. The 2026 software put the controls for it in one place.
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The 2026.26 Summer Update: what actually arrives on a car you order now
Grok can now place calls and open the glovebox, Teams and Discord joined Theater mode, and navigation started learning your routes. An inventory, not a review.
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Tesla's 0% APR on the Model Y ended in early August — here's what a higher rate actually costs you
The promotional financing that even discounted Model Y Performance to 3.99% APR is gone — any rate you're quoted above that is new, real, compounding cost.
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The car-loan interest deduction just got its paperwork: Form 1098-VLI and Schedule 1-A
From tax year 2026, lenders report qualifying interest on Form 1098-VLI and the VIN goes on Schedule 1-A — and the income phase-out math is worth running before you assume the full $10,000.
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Model Y prices went up for the first time in two years — what that does to your referral math
Premium trims are up $1,000, Performance up $500, Entry unchanged — the referral link's value didn't move, so its share of the price did.
Earlier coverage
Published before this section existed and still at their original URLs:
Every figure here is checked against a primary source and dated. If a number changes, the dispatch is corrected in place and the update date says so — we don't re-date an unchanged page to look fresh.