As of approximately early August 2024, Tesla has now begun to charge for Supercharging by the partial kWh, rather than by rounding down to the nearest kWh. So far, this change appears to be applicable throughout North America and Europe.
We speculated that Tesla may start doing this when the Tesla app was updated to v4.34.1. Previously, Tesla only displayed whole numbers for kWh charged. With this app update, Tesla started showing four decimal places, however, until recently the decimals were always zero.
As of now Tesla now rounds charging to four decimal places (the ten-thousandth place) for the energy provided.
Partial Charges
This means that your Supercharging bills will be more accurate and possibly more expensive, but also nets Tesla a few additional cents on the transaction.
For example, if you previously Supercharged 30.3245 kWh in July at $0.50 per kWh, you’d have been billed exactly $15 since the energy used would have been rounded to 30 kWh. However, with these changes, you would now be billed for the exact kWh used, so your bill would be $15.16 (rounded down to the nearest cent).
This isn’t a hugely impactful change for most of us who use Superchargers occasionally, but for Tesla as a whole, these partial charges likely add up to thousands of dollars of revenue every day.
Superchargers are expensive to plan, permit, produce, install, and commission, so each additional cent helps justify Tesla’s expansion of its Supercharging network. In fact, Tesla just bought a parking lot in NYC to presumably build a new Supercharger for $18 million. Additionally, this change helps Tesla to be more accurate in accounting for electricity delivered to vehicles.
Supercharger Expansion
Even after the big shakeup of the Supercharger team, Tesla has committed itself to expanding its network in North America, with new locations still being planned and prepared, and some new ones being commissioned between then and today.
Tesla has set out to expand and continue its Supercharger program, so we can get behind the Supercharger team eking out the last few drops of revenue to keep the expansion going. Hopefully, some of the new locations are in relatively remote locations to help close of the charging gaps.
