PSA: Tesla has replaced Idle Fees with Congestion Fees at all North America superchargers. This affects anyone who uses their network, Tesla or not.

I see both sides. I've sat there waiting while Uber Model 3s charged all the way to 100% so I could get going when I was at 10% or lower. That said, on my most recent Tesla road trip I left at 90%, then drove at 58 mph to the next supercharger and pulled in with 2% left. In that situation I'd have happily paid a congestion fee rather than be that stressed.

You can't actually tell whether they were going to 100, though. Superchargers have no screens that would call those people out.

Maybe superchargers should get some lighting or color cues, although I'd rather see full NEVI compliance. Also, how do charging sites handle people who simply park in the spots?

Handling that is exactly the unsolved problem in EV charging, and none of the providers wants to deal with it. There's no chance Tesla adds anything extra to its superchargers, since simplicity is the entire point. That's why they're toying with this fee idea: making the slow tail of the charge curve cost more.

Most of the time, there's a sign stating plainly that the spot is for EVs while charging only. If someone is just parked in one of those spots, EV or not, you can phone the charging network's support (EA, EVgo, Tesla, etc.), report it with the license plate, and there's a decent chance a tow truck gets sent. Without a sign, unfortunately, towing probably won't hold up. I saw this when two SUVs ICEd the only working Level 2 chargers in my local supermarket lot. In moments like that I'm really glad to own a J1772 extension cable: I park as awkwardly close to their vehicle as I can, plug in anyway, and with luck get to watch them puzzle over the fact that I charged despite their jerk move.

I've noticed that Uber drivers in M3s, or really any Tesla being used for Uber, tend to be pretty bad at using chargers on any network. Honestly, though, the same goes for nearly anyone in the US who just got an EV and hasn't figured out how charging works. At the Sam's Club near me, I constantly see people sitting in their cars waiting for the battery to climb past 95% or beyond, looking annoyed or downright miserable. I use an A2Z adapter, which works fine most of the time, though now and then I have to wiggle it around. Plenty of curious people have walked up, wondering what on earth this big hunk of plastic is that I'm jamming into my car, and asked "Is that an adapter? Do I need one?" even though they're already plugged in. Nearly every time, the chat wraps up with them admitting they have no clue how any of it works. Roughly half to two-thirds of those people drive Honda Prologues. They're extra baffled that their car, hooked to a 150kW charger, never pulls more than about 90kW. That comes down to GM's odd decision to build a 280V pack on that vehicle. Dear GM: simply advertise the max rate as 90kW. It's a rotten move to nudge slower-charging owners toward the 350kW stalls just so they can approach the headline speed x.x;

Agreed, it's a bit of a mess since everybody knows different amounts. What bugs me a little is seeing slow-charging cars parked at fast chargers when slower stalls are free.

Most of the time I try to stay calm, since it's usually the manufacturer or the salesperson who failed to tell them, and the salesperson probably didn't know either. What gets me is when someone blocks the CHAdeMO connector by charging on the CCS1 plug at one of those cabinets with two cables but only one charge going at a time. I remind myself that they likely have no idea CHAdeMO is rare, what its plug looks like, or why that charger has a different connector, and then I let it go. That's partly why I bought my adapter. Whenever possible I pick the slower fast chargers, preferably the CHAdeMO one, though sadly a few times I've reluctantly had to hook my LEAF up to a 350kW unit x.x;

If they drive for Uber, then yes, that tracks. Uber M3 drivers mostly don't know how their cars work.

Maybe that'd work better than sneaking in congestion pricing behind the scenes? /s

I've been in that spot. It's terrifying, like range anxiety multiplied a thousand times over.

That's even more true in winter, when roads shut down, particularly the ones running through national parks.

(clutches pearls) How dare that person charge their car all the way?!? Doesn't he realize I'm in a rush!?!

Central and Eastern Oregon would like a word.

I live in the mountains, where the limit is 120 km/h. To get much better efficiency I keep it to 100 km/h on flat stretches, 120 on steep downhills, and 85 on steep climbs. Over 300 kilometers that saves me around 70 to 80 km of range. So even on a 650 km trip I don't need to charge to 100%. Just my take.

When the whole family is sitting there waiting, crawling from 80% up to 90% on the charger seems to take forever.

Yeah, that final stretch of charging is hard on everybody's patience, and it's worse with kids buckled in the back 😅. Still, it's sometimes the only way you'll reach the next charger.

What really wears on me is hearing EV drivers brush off range concerns with "how often do you even do a road trip?" Even Hank Green made that lazy argument recently, and he's a Montana resident. If you live in the western states, a long drive isn't a road trip, it's simply how you get anywhere. Plenty of us have to cover 100+ miles just to buy something beyond groceries, and a doctor's visit 3 hours from home isn't unusual. Add in poor winter range and the fear of being stuck out in the cold, and it gets grim. EVs can definitely work for people in this situation, me included, but we need the biggest battery available and have to charge past 90% regularly.

From an environmental angle too (assuming people still care about that), the folks who log the most miles are exactly the ones we ought to be nudging and rewarding to go electric. And improving EVs for long-distance drivers eventually helps those with shorter commutes as well. Props to you for running an EV in one of the harder places to do it!

Check how many people actually live in those states. The reason anyone has to drive 100 miles to get somewhere is that barely anyone lives out there. So for 99.9% of EV owners, situations like this just aren't relevant.

So 99.9% of EV owners are all living in the places where only 88% of people live? Strange! And in Canada, nearly a third of the population is rural, and it's absolutely a problem here.

Another fix is simply building more DC fast chargers. With luck, they'll end up being as common as gas stations someday.

Sure, some people live where every trip means 100 miles of driving. But they make up a minuscule share of the population, so they can mostly be set aside when talking about the country at large. Living in rural Wyoming? Well, congrats, but you and people like you are around .01% of the nation's population. Carmakers shouldn't be designing vehicles around you.

Wyoming's GDP per capita came in at $91,400, so it's a pretty productive state.

That's a strong GDP per capita, no doubt. It's just that Wyoming doesn't have many capita to divide it by.

For a while my home charger was dead, so I was stuck using a supercharger at a nearby Meijer for my Mustang. What drove me nuts was how many drivers would plug in and then wander off to shop for ages. The lot only had about 10 stalls, and I sat around for roughly 50 minutes waiting for one to free up, only to charge for 25 minutes once I got in.

I really dislike when something like a Bolt sits at a supercharger for a couple of hours, and it even straddles 2 stalls. Fees for congestion like this seem like a sensible way to discourage that behavior.

Maybe 2 or 3 times a year for me. I suspect you're overlooking people who tow trailers. Still, in my area I've never actually seen a supercharger completely full.

They're not out in the middle of nowhere at all; they're along major routes, like I-10 across the Southwest.

Take a road trip to a national park and see. I had to start with a full 100% battery to get in and back out to the supercharger on the far side of the mountains.

These days I have the Long Range, so almost never. My old Standard Range Plus was a different story, and it came up a lot. It had around 250 miles of range, and if you stop at 80% and want to keep a 10-15% reserve, you effectively have only 65-70% of that to use. At 70% that works out to something like 175 miles. I don't believe Tesla sells anything under 300 miles of range anymore, though other brands do, and all of that ignores how much range you lose in winter.

I do. My daughter attends college nearly 500 miles from me, and unless I'm at 100% at the midpoint, I can't complete the trip. On top of that, I drive the shortest-range car available, a Model 3 with roughly 260 miles.

On essentially every road trip when it's under 40F, I can't make it from the closest supercharger back to my house unless I'm charged to at least 93%, and that's if I want to arrive with 10% left. When it's really cold, I need a full 100%, plus slow driving and barely any cabin heat.

My car holds full charging speed up to 89%, and its maximum range is around 160 miles.

I took my Model 3 to 100% at a supercharger exactly once, maybe 6 years back, and it was a miserable wait. Stopping at 80% is perfectly fine.

Expect congestion fees to become normal. Charging networks earn their money per kWh, so a car crawling along at 25kW as it nears a full battery is costing them money, when a nearly empty EV could be plugged in and pulling 160kW instead. The fee frees up the stall for other drivers, and it also lets the network claw back the revenue it loses to whoever is hogging the plug.

It'll be a fun time once their 1000V superchargers show up everywhere and everyone with a current Tesla is stuck crawling along at slow speeds.

I drive an 800V car, and honestly I'd be happy if they simply got up to that level.

Haha, that's going to take years, man. Years and years.

Another question: if people are nudged into not charging all the way up, does that actually help EV batteries last longer, like it does for other batteries?

This could be a real problem. There's one choke-point charger in the middle of Nevada where I have to reach at least 90% or I can't make the following charger. That Supercharger is always busy, and normally just a couple of stalls are free.

Same situation for me. Going from Grants Pass, OR to Crescent City, CA, 80% doesn't reliably get me there, and there's nowhere to charge in between. 🫤

On the bright side, I've never seen more than 2 of the 16 stalls in use at Grants Pass, so congestion fees shouldn't often come into play there.

Highway 199 between Grants Pass and Crescent City is only about 80 miles. There are hills, sure, but they can't be that rough, can they? Unless you're in a Fiat 500e? edit Oh, you drive a Tesla X, which has well over 300 miles of range. I don't buy your comment.

I ran it through ABRP using a 75D with the software-limited pack, aka the 60D. Leaving at 80% gets an estimated 33% on arrival. I can't see why anyone would need 90%, even driving 20 over in ten-below weather, if they have a newer Long Range car. On a current Long Range, that trip is estimated to eat about 26% of the battery. My best guess is they're planning a round trip with no charging stop in Crescent City. When I plan a route from Seattle to Crescent City with the 60D, ABRP suggests leaving at 61% to arrive with 27%. (edit: I don't know why that differs so much from the 80% result, though both seem believable from my experience. I probably changed a speed setting while messing around, and I won't redo it. Either way, you definitely don't need 90% to get from Grants Pass to Crescent City in a Model X.) The last time I drove it, I didn't even stop to charge at Grants Pass.

Chatting with fellow Tesla owners at Superchargers, I've noticed that some of them fill up to almost 100% at every single stop on a road trip. I can't figure out why, unless they're treating it like a gas car where you naturally top the tank off. I've tried telling them it'd be quicker to follow the route planner or head out at around 60-70%, but plenty of them don't seem to get it.

Last September I took my 2019 Model 3 from Oregon out to Maine via Canada on the TCH, then came home along I-80. Before leaving, I mapped out every charging stop, keeping the distance between them to roughly 140 miles at most. The stations were never crowded; the only place where over half the stalls were occupied was around Boise, Idaho. Most drivers seemed to plug in for under 15 minutes, frequently only about 5, so I followed suit. I never worried about range once, and the whole thing was a great trip.

Agreed. I drove that same section recently and left Crescent at 80%, then rolled into Medford with something like 25% left, if I remember right.

From what I've heard, a permit was issued for a charger in Cave Junction, though I haven't come across any word that construction has actually begun.

BYD keeps coming up with faster ways to charge, while Elon just looks for ways to wring out every last dollar. We really need a better network.

Remember when he lost his temper and fired the whole Supercharger team? Or when he threatened to retire the Dragon launch vehicle? You're right that we need someone else providing charging. And I doubt the current administration will do anything to help EV drivers in the near future.

So the idea, at least on paper, is that this frees up space at the charger, since only drivers who truly need to go beyond 80% would do it, and they'd pay an additional $5 for that. Hopefully it isn't a route you drive so often that an extra $5 wrecks your budget.

Worth remembering that this fee only kicks in when the Supercharger is nearly full. The rest of the time, you can go all the way to 100% without any added charge.

It really annoys me when someone hogs a stall during the busiest hours just to spend 20 minutes creeping from 95% to 100%. That said, there are plenty of times when I have to charge beyond 80% in order to get home without stress.

The genuine fix is unfortunately the toughest one to pull off right now: build more chargers. If you could quickly and easily charge to 60-80% and trust that a few solid options sat between there and your destination, most networks, particularly the busy ones, could enforce charge caps without hurting drivers at all. It would actually save them time and money. Until that happens, I honestly can't say what the best compromise is. Options might include idle fees, congestion fees, towing, or a points-style system. If someone runs late once or twice, something unusual probably happened, so maybe no penalty. If it happens more often, maybe steeper fees. And if it's constant, to the point that the fee is basically a convenience charge for them, perhaps their account gets suspended for a while. I'm just brainstorming here, lol.

Stopping at 90% is still plenty quick, since charging rates don't fall off as sharply as people make out. I'd say the idle cap ought to sit around 85%, or even 90%.

Finally, thank goodness, somebody is taking action against drivers who sit on their cars until they hit 100% right when the stalls are busiest.

A cap seems crazy to me. There's no way to tell whether a driver needs extra charge to reach where they're going, and it adds an unknown into route planning that the app they used to plan the trip may not even factor in.

I can't say much about Superchargers, but the Electrify America sites that do this are in places where you can reach the next charger anyway. That's not every EA site, mainly the city ones, and from what I've noticed usually the ones with only 3 or 4 stalls.

When a Supercharger station is busy it holds you to 80%, though you can override that by hand.

Telling road trippers "if you're plugged in at a mall, you obviously aren't on a road trip" isn't a fair argument.

What bothers me more on a road trip is waiting at an EA station while several cars crawl up to 100%. Caps could go a long way toward fixing that.

On road trips I've taken through Mississippi, Colorado and Arizona, I've run into plenty of chargers at malls.

Many of these chargers are located at a mall or outside some big chain retailer.

Tesla is a private company, right? And doesn't it own the sites where the Superchargers sit? Why wouldn't it be able to set its own charging rules?

Just my two cents: anyone who routinely has to DC fast charge all the way to 100% probably shouldn't be taking a BEV on that trip, or maybe shouldn't own one at all. Whenever I know a drive in my Mach E will top about 120 miles each way, I start scouting chargers. It isn't enough that one exists on the route. I check how reliably it's working, how often it's crowded, and how far it is to the following charger. If the area turns out to be a charging desert, I simply take a different car. That's exactly why ABRP is around. My sense is that plenty of people went all-electric without really grasping what that commits you to.

Wait, what? The whole point of ABRP is that you can plan with confidence to cross charging deserts. If the only downside of an EV is sitting at a charger a bit longer, I'm not interested in going back to a gas car. Sure, needing 100% every single time would be extreme, but the real issue is that drivers ought to make their own calls. Hit me with steep congestion pricing if you want, that's fine. What I don't want is to pull up to a station and find I'm hard capped at 85% when I need a bit more to feel safe reaching the next stop.

Try seeing it the way EA, Tesla and the like do. A car crawling along at 30-50kW while it squeezes in the last 15% can occupy a stall for as long as another car needs to go from 15% to 85%. Especially at a busy site, the operator is potentially losing money on whoever is lingering to reach 100%. For me personally, charging already eats more time than fueling a gas car, so I'm not keen to burn another 30-45 minutes at one stop just to arrive at the next with maybe 10 more miles of range. I also already keep my ABRP settings fairly conservative. And relying on a full 100% just to scrape to the next available charger doesn't strike me as a smart way to risk stranding myself. Anyway, that's only my view.

Right, so congestion pricing doesn't bother me, and I'd accept the final 15% costing as much as the first 85%, or even more. What's a problem is imposing an arbitrary cap, since the trip may have been planned around a different assumption.

Only a small share of EA's stations actually have this cap. Of the 10 nearest to me, just one lists an 85% limit, even though I know several of the ones I looked at regularly have queues. I'd argue most of their chargers should have the limit, except those sitting at the edge of a charging desert.

Fine, but why won't they just spell out their rules plainly?

"When busy" refers to the charger showing itself as busy, which generally just means no free stalls are left. "Near full" has been clarified as 80%. This has been coming for some time. Edit: Looks like what was really being asked was, "Why didn't this press release spell out exactly how many stalls at some given station must be in use before congestion fees kick in?"

One possible reason is that a site may flip to busy when lots of cars are on their way to it. It's preferable to nudge people to leave before those arriving cars show up than to make the newcomers wait.

How clear would you like it? Fireworks? Congestion Fee Your vehicle's battery is already at or above the congestion fee level of 80% battery charge; or Your charging session has ended If you meet the criteria for a congestion fee while Supercharging, the vehicle touchscreen and the Tesla app will notify you that congestion fees apply.

My understanding is that they, like me, meant clarity about how full the site has to be, meaning how many stalls are occupied, before congestion fees start. They weren't asking about the state of charge required.

Seems to me this isn't new. At the busiest chargers it was already in place, and it simply got switched off when traffic was lighter or at sites that rarely had anyone plugged in. Now it sounds like they're rolling it out everywhere, quieter locations included.

Is there any way to tell whether the congestion fee is active at a given time?

Not really. If you'd rather play it safe, just don't charge beyond 80% SOC. Once you get near that level, the notice saying congestion fees could apply past 80% will always appear.

I tried this out today at a Supercharger that had open stalls. No warning showed up at all, and I went up to 87% without being hit with any congestion fee.

You can check in the Tesla app, it turns out. In the list of nearby chargers, a site with a yellow bar graph icon is labeled "Busy", and on the map view the busy ones show a small clock icon.

Whether I think this is a good move hinges on the "undisclosed" method they use to decide a charger counts as busy. Where a site is truly crowded and people are likely to wait, I'm completely fine with a congestion fee. That hasn't matched my experience for years, though. The stations I use never fill up enough to cause a queue. I've waited just once, around 15 minutes, over the last several years, and I Supercharge 2-4 times weekly (two Teslas, both with unlimited free Supercharging). My worry is that Tesla will turn this into a revenue source by labeling chargers as busy even when they're only partly occupied.

I'm wondering how this plays out for people with free Supercharging. Would they still be billed past 80%, even if they genuinely need the extra range and charging is meant to cost them nothing?

According to the FAQ, and matching what I've seen myself, cars built and delivered before 2017 are exempt from congestion fees, all the way up to 100% SOC or until the session ends.

Thanks, OP really came through! Though plenty of free-Supercharging cars were made after 2016 too, a few even sold this year, so I'm curious whether their contracts handle this differently.

My wife drives a 2017 Model S 100D, among the final cars to get the early-adopter "free for life" charging. It's covered 100k miles with about 45% done at Superchargers. Rough math at some watt-hours per mile puts it near 15,000 kWh at $0.45 per kWh, which works out to around $6,750 of free electricity :-)

I'm also in a 100D Model X from the same year, which was delivered at the tail end of 2017. The charging history we can see only reaches back to 2022, which may coincide with when the MCU2 upgrade was done. We've put 88k miles on it, and our Supercharging sessions generally run somewhere between 50% and 85%. Over the years we've been offered, a handful of times, the chance to carry the Supercharging over to a new car. I'm curious whether the terms of that deal have shifted since then.

Yep, I've gotten offers like that as well, and as far as I can tell they usually come with just one or two years of "free" Supercharging. I plan to hold on to both of our cars until they fall apart. Part of the fun is picturing Elon covering me for roughly a dollar a minute in free electricity while I pull up to a Supercharger and chat with the Tesla fans there :-)

State of charge is a lousy yardstick. Eighty percent in one car is nothing like eighty percent in another: for some it's barely 100 highway miles, and for others it's north of 300, so one driver may genuinely need that charge more than the next. A bigger concern, to my mind, is a car that has derated itself and sits crawling along at Level-2 speeds while only at 60%. I'd far prefer fees kick in when someone drops under 40kW for something like 5 minutes. And if there's no on-screen warning or in-car alert about the charging costs, plenty of people are likely to get blindsided, for instance anyone using plug-and-charge with a non-Tesla.

Totally agree. Without my free unlimited Supercharging I'd be in real trouble. The EPA rating on my car is only 204 miles, and in practice it's closer to 160, lol. On top of that, the pack is physically 90kWh, but Tesla generously locked it down to 60 kWh. They had their reasons and I get them, though it still bugs me a little. The upshot is that the 80% on my display, which is what the congestion fee is based on, is nowhere near my real 80%, and I've often been pulling around 100kW at that displayed level.

Ha, it took me a couple reads to understand you meant a software-limited pack. That's exactly the type of situation I had in mind. Even without software locks, lots of vehicles can still pull better than 50kW all the way past 95%. When I owned a Tesla, a 2015 Model S, ours was one of the 85kWh packs where they throttled the charging. In theory it was good for 272 miles, though 200 on the highway in nice weather would've been a stretch, and the charging was crippled so that we stayed under 100kW for nearly the whole curve. They eased that back a bit some months afterward, but I was glad to see the car go when we moved to our Rivians.

Wouldn't a car that only manages 100 miles from 80% be pretty old, and thus unable to use Tesla's chargers anyway? The cars that actually plug in there are newer and modern, and they have more range than the older ones.

What about in cold weather? Plenty of vehicles sold today would only deliver around 100 miles of real-world highway range in winter. Pretty much anything rated at 200 miles or under likely lands there. Even a standard 20%-80% session covers just 120 miles, so ordinary 70mph driving in decent weather would bring you close to 100 anyway. Honestly, I don't think it changes the argument much regardless. Even with 1000 miles of range, sitting at a 50kWh charge rate is probably holding up a lot of other people. What I'm really getting at is that 80% doesn't mean the same thing for every car.

You should try driving in the mountains when it's -14°F.

First off, outside North America, Japan and China, the bulk of EVs have CCS2 ports and can charge directly at Tesla Superchargers that have been opened up to other brands. CCS1 and NACS adapters are also available in North America. CHAdeMO adapters exist too, but they aren't passive, so they're very expensive. Also, something like towing can cut a modern EV's range far below what you'd expect.

Another option is to charge for a minimum of 50 kW, no matter how slow the actual charging speed is.

Honestly this irritates me. Right now I'm partway through a road trip of about 2,500 miles, and a number of stops along the way require me to charge beyond 80%.

If the station is crowded you'll just be paying roughly $4 more per session. Anyone who can afford a Rivian and a 2,500-mile drive probably won't feel that much. It could even thin out the crowds at those stops and save you some waiting. I'd love for EA to adopt this too, especially for EV drivers around the New York metro area. Since NYC requires every taxi and rideshare vehicle to be electric, driving from Philly up to Boston means I have to plan my charging around the roughly 50 miles surrounding the city, because every station there has a line of Model 3s sitting at charge up to 100%.

The fee kicks in only when a station is full or close to it. The rest of the time, you can charge as high as you like and pay nothing extra.

Doesn't this just apply when the chargers are busy? That sounds like a sensible change overall to me. On a road trip, I'd no longer have to hurry out of a restaurant to move my car off a charger that's almost empty of other customers.

Isn't congestion really only a problem when people are waiting for a charger?

I might be alone here, but I think this is a good move. For most cars, going from 80 to 100% takes about as long as going from 0 to 80%. What they really need to do is CLEARLY spell out what counts as a 'busy' site, and also flag locations where stopping at 80% may not be realistic, such as charging deserts where you could NEED a full battery to reach the next charger.

I agree completely. I think there ought to be a visible indicator showing whether a station is currently considered congested. It could also send a phone notification along the lines of 'the station you're charging at is getting busy, so congestion fees now apply if you go past 80%.'

The Tesla app and the cars themselves already show icons and warnings when a station is busy.

Considering how much money Tesla is losing, we should have expected something like this, and ethics isn't part of their business model anyway.

Maybe they could waive it when the trip planner calls for charging to 90% or 100%, like out west where the chargers can be spaced very far apart.

Setting a destination temporarily is far too simple a trick to get around this. And it wouldn't cover the growing share of EVs, soon to be most of them, that aren't Teslas but use Superchargers.

Simple fix: don't charge congestion fees at those locations.

One option would be to give the fee back if the driver stops to charge at every one of the following stops on their planned route.

Makes me curious how soon somebody will build a gadget that fakes your battery's state of charge so you can dodge the fees that kick in above 80%.

Doesn't sound smart to me. The BMS sets the charging rate according to the state of charge, so faking that value might be risky. Then again, safety concerns have rarely stopped people from experimenting.

Couldn't you fake the figure only on the charger's side and still be fine? The car is the one that asks for a certain amount of power. Say mine reaches 80% and wants just 40kW to keep going: if the charger believes I'm at 60%, it still delivers only the 40kW I asked for. In other words, whatever percentage the charger thinks the car is at, it supplies just what the car requests. If the spoofing only touches what the charger sees, the BMS still has the true value and asks for the right amount.

Not sure whether the protocol is encrypted at all. If it isn't, then in theory you could put a device between the car and the charger that scales the real charge percentage by 80% and shouldn't disturb anything else. Still, that seems like a lot of cost and risk merely to game the tail end of a charge.

That's exactly my problem. I run into plenty of cases where I need a full 100%, and the station is typically quiet. It's worse in winter, when I can use two to three times my usual power. 90% or 95% I could live with, but 80% isn't enough.

A quiet station means no congestion fee, so this doesn't affect you in those cases.

Going from 80% to 100% takes about as long as going from 0% to 80%. Charging past 80% is basically loitering; people did it to sidestep earlier idle fees while only trickling a bit more into the battery. A small group of drivers genuinely needs more than 80%, but unless the station is full, they won't be affected anyway. So this is a good way to get people to quit tying up chargers by topping off beyond what they need.

I'm not sure I understand how this fee actually works. Today I noticed something odd: I charged all the way to 100% but unplugged before calibration finished, and I never got billed. The station only had two cars at it out of eight stalls. On another occasion I was the sole car there. Does how busy the place is determine whether the fee gets applied? It also matters for anyone with an LFP battery, since Tesla specifically advises charging those to 100% at least weekly.

What you're looking at is a congestion fee. It kicks in only when the station is crowded and you're charging beyond 80%. If the place is mostly empty, nobody minds you filling to 100%, so go for it.

Want to know what actually fixes this? Build a lot more chargers, everywhere, right now.

I can't find any of this on Tesla's website or in the Supercharger terms of use. Can you point me to a source for the change? Edit: To clarify, I don't see idle fees being removed, or anything else new, for that matter.

The way you described it isn't accurate. The fee starts once the station is over 50% occupied, and it doubles when every stall is taken. You get hit with it only if your car has reached 80% and stays there longer than 5 minutes, or if you finish charging and leave the car plugged in and parked for more than 5 minutes.

That reads like a line from the next Fast and the Furious movie: "I live my life only 4 minutes at a time."

I think congestion fees are more sensible than idle fees. If no one's waiting for a stall, I shouldn't pay anything. That's reasonable to me.

I didn't get through all 300 comments, so apologies if this is repeated, but congestion pricing generally applies only once a charging station is more than half full.

Sadly it's necessary. I prefer this to EA's approach of simply cutting you off at 80%. With this, if I want 85% I can still choose it, just at a higher price. In my car, going from 80 to 85% might add roughly $4, which isn't a big deal.

Screw Tesla and screw Musk. There's a route I take in winter with so few Superchargers on it that I have to charge to 100% twice just to complete it. The company could have put money into building more chargers, but the CEO spent his on buying an election.

Wow, that's rough. My car has an LFP battery, so I'm supposed to fill it to 100% every week, and if this fee ends up being costly I may have to get rid of the car. Does it only apply when the Superchargers are crowded?

Actually, you aren't required to. Tesla asks for it so the BMS on an LFP pack can recalibrate. Skipping the weekly full charge won't do lasting damage; the worst outcome is that the GOM (Guess O Meter) becomes a bit less precise. If you want a full charge anyway, you can top up to about 80% at a charger elsewhere, then leave the car plugged into any ordinary 120 V level one outlet overnight to finish, and it'll be at 100% when you need to head out. Edit: GOM stands for Guess O Meter.

Unfortunately I've got nowhere else to charge, since I live in an apartment building. I bought a Tesla specifically because there's a charger at my gym and another just a block from home. I've already experimented with stopping short of full, and the estimated range goes erratic while the car keeps nagging me to charge to 100%.

My LFP hasn't been charged to 100% in the last 4 months, and as a result I'm seeing much less degradation.

What makes you say that? The car sends alerts telling me it needs a full charge once a week, and I'm just doing what the owner's manual says. It's in there for a reason, isn't it?

It is, but the reason is mostly to head off range-anxiety complaints. Whatever a manufacturer recommends has to balance keeping customers happy against avoiding lawsuits, and battery chemistry and physics don't change because a line appears in a manual. No battery enjoys sitting at 100%. The one real purpose of a full charge is recalibrating the BMS, and unless you regularly drive long distances with no charger available, you needn't bother. When I last filled my LFP pack, I'd lost only 3% to degradation across almost 3 years, far below what's typical. Plenty of resources explain how to care for a battery properly. Go to 100% if you need the range or lack convenient charging, absolutely, but don't do it merely because the manual says so.

Huh, and I thought I was doing the right thing for battery health. I'm nearly at the 2-year mark and have lost under 2% of range.

Going from 80% to 100% takes about as long as going from 0 to 80%. So yes, the fee makes sense: it keeps Superchargers from turning into Electrify America, where every slow-charging car sits there to 100% and forces everyone else into a long, pointless wait.

The fee description says a congestion fee applies only when a Supercharger site is busy and one of several conditions is met. But what counts as "busy"?

I'm really let down by Tesla. Is this your first time?

It wasn't that long ago that this forum was full of people announcing "CCS is dead!" and cheering "Good riddance to EA!", all while insisting Elon was the right person to trust with public charging. Funny how that turned out.

Good!! Honestly, this is the only thing that will reach the "charge it to 100%" crowd, the mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers who have no idea that stopping around 80 is both better and quicker. There are plenty of them, and they're about to get an education. If you truly need a full battery, unplug from the supercharger at 80 and top off on an L2. Short on time? Take it to 90 at the Supercharger and finish on L2. Otherwise, pay up for the privilege of hogging a busy stall, or find a quieter one. Zero sympathy from me. I'm in a rural state where superchargers are scarce and the gaps between them are huge, especially once you factor in the return trip. Still, L2 and CCS options exist, so it's doable without charging past 80. Just yesterday I towed an enclosed car trailer, averaging about 850 watt-hours per mile, and I charged twice. Each time I had to unhitch the trailer, and I STILL never went above 80! Even with unhitching and rehitching, stopping at 80 was faster. My other prediction: somebody will build an adapter that sits between the car and the station and feeds the charger a fake state of charge.

One more reason I treat Tesla chargers as a last resort, used only when nothing else is available and I have to charge to reach my destination. I'd pick a shared 50kW station before a Tesla one.

I agree, but EA is doing the same thing, and it's even dumber on their end, since they cap the charge percentage.

I only fill to 100% at a supercharger on long-distance trips. This new fee will make me steer clear of the Tesla charging network entirely, I promise you that. #EffTesla

It's a tough one and cuts both ways. I see the reasoning, but it hurts people like me. I drive rideshare on weekends, so I charge to 100% because I run the battery down as far as I can before refilling to keep going. I'm using the service for a legitimate reason, and I don't touch superchargers at all during the week, so this penalizes me unfairly.

Congestion fees didn't take the place of idle fees. They're separate charges, each meant to nudge selfish drivers toward a different good habit. Idle fees push people to unplug once charging finishes, so a charger isn't blocked by a car that's no longer charging. Congestion fees apply where every stall is occupied and others are waiting. They encourage drivers to leave once their charging speed has dropped off, rather than crawling from 80% to 100%. They can hit the road and then charge much faster at their next stop when the battery is low, which saves them a lot of time.

That's fine, as long as the next charger isn't further away than, say, 70% of your battery's range.

True, but along highways there's a DC fast charger roughly every 40 miles on average. If a route needs more than 80% of your range to reach the next charger, nothing stops you from charging to 100%, even at a 'congested' site. Actually, those drivers come out ahead when everyone who doesn't need a full charge unplugs, because it lets them start charging sooner.

What really matters is how a location gets classified as "congested." We need a clear definition, not something vague.

If you're driving across Wyoming, you pretty much have to charge up to 90% or higher.

Honestly, the way EA just cuts the session off at 85% is far better than what Tesla is doing now. It's wild to see Tesla build such a huge lead in EVs and Supercharging and then completely drop the ball. I'd basically steer clear of Superchargers now, since I can't tell what counts as "When Busy" or "Close to Full". Plenty of times, and I do mean plenty, I've plugged in at a Supercharger and, half an hour later, found only one or two stalls still free. I also tend to use my local one just while shopping. So I plug in and shop, usually for around 50 minutes, which reliably takes me past 80%, since I generally go on weekends to the store roughly 15-20 minutes from home. Getting back takes something like 6-10% of the battery depending on traffic. But if there's a chance I'll be hit with a "Congestion Fee", I'd rather skip it entirely. A congestion fee exists to cut down on use of a service when it's busy. In my case it has worked, because I'll be so preoccupied with working out what my charge level will be and when that I'll just stay away. On the few high-demand EA chargers with the 85% cap, at least I know it's a firm limit: charging stops, I get 10 minutes to clear out before idle fees begin, and that's all. I don't have to fret over surprise charges because I lost track of my battery level while inside the store.

My Tesla app has no card on file, so I have no idea how they intend to bill me. If Tesla wants my car to charge faster at Superchargers, it shouldn't have throttled my car's charging speed in the first place. It should have recalled the car and fixed its lousy batteries instead. Good luck trying to bill me. Free unlimited supercharging means free, unlimited supercharging.

It'll go the same way it did for everybody whose card was declined. Your supercharging is free, but once a congestion fee lands on your account, you're locked out of Superchargers until you pay it. Even a 50 cent balance will follow you around until it's settled.

"Unlimited" means there are no limits. An idle fee applies when you aren't charging, so that's billable. A "congestion" fee applies while you are still charging, so that shouldn't be something that can be restricted under an unlimited plan. I get that Tesla reads it differently, but it's irritating, particularly since they already changed, with no real justification, what counts as 80% on my car.

I think it ought to be 90%. Speeds between 80 and 90% are still pretty fast, and that extra range means far less worry about reaching the next charger in regions where they're sparse.

People are going to love this one. Elon needs his cash.

Thanks for explaining. So it seems the people who need to go above 80% take the biggest hit when a station is congested. I'm curious when this was introduced.

I just got my first taste of how bad this system is. I pulled into a Supercharger at 10pm with nobody else there, and everything nearby was closed except a Burger King across the road. I couldn't even finish eating, even rushing as fast as I could, before I got a notification saying I had enough charge to get home and congestion fees were now in effect. That was before reaching 80%. Apparently I was penalized because the trip was still loaded in the car's nav, and it was routing me home with only 10% left (yeah, lol, not realistic). When I returned to the car, 6 of 10 stalls were occupied, I was at 78%, and I'd racked up 8 minutes of congestion fees. The whole setup is terrible. It ought to warn you as the station fills up and tell you fees might begin if it keeps going, then give a much longer grace period, especially if you haven't hit 80%. Tesla should be aiming to get you to your next stop with a 20% cushion at the very least.

No Tesla gets even 300 miles of range. My 2024 Model Y can barely manage about 170 miles on the highway in North Dakota, where the speed limit is 80mph.

Got hit with an idle/overstay-type fee during a road trip, and I'm pretty annoyed about it. The trip needed nearly a full battery to reach my next stop, so I fast-charged at a Supercharger up to about 65%, then switched over to a slower charger to top off the remaining ~30% while I sat down for lunch. I rolled into my destination with only 12 miles of range to spare. Now I've been billed an extra fee, apparently because the slow charger was being used to push the battery past 80%, and it was the only one in that lot. What's the point of paying for a battery with all that extra range if I get penalized every time I actually use it? Honestly it feels ridiculous that their lack of enough chargers is being pushed back onto customers like me.