Tesla is once again axing its referral program, which allowed owners to earn prizes by referring new buyers to buy a Tesla.
For many years now, Tesla has offered some sort of program to allow current owners to benefit from evangelizing the brand.
It started early on, when Tesla owners recognized that they had “sold” several Teslas to their friends via test drives, conversations, and so on, and owners asked Tesla to implement a scheme to give them referral rewards.
The program was originally launched in 2015, and has evolved many times since then. It started off as a direct $1,000 reward, but later turned into various tier systems, point systems, and so on.
A buyer would use a current owner’s referral link to place an order, and in return the buyer would get some sort of benefit (a discount, some free supercharging, or some free FSD access), and the referrer would get credit towards some sort of prize.
At one point, Tesla even promised free or discounted next-gen Roadsters, and ended up promising giving away around 80 of them – or at least, promising to, whenever that car (or is it even a car?) may or may not finally get made.
Unsurprisingly, after promising such substantial prizes, Tesla substantially reduced the prizes available in 2019, and later ended the program for everything except solar roof in 2021.
But the next year, Tesla brought the referral program back, though again in a more limited form. This version would give buyers either temporary free supercharging, temporary FSD access, temporary premium connectivity, or $500 off a new vehicle (depending on when you purchased the vehicle), and referrers would get credits that could be redeemed in Tesla’s shop for merchandise or accessories.
It also occasionally offered special prizes like accelerated Cybertruck delivery, invites to the Cybertruck delivery event, or entries into vehicle sweepstakes that could be purchased with referral credits.
However, all of that is ending now, on April 30th. Tesla announced today that the referral program will be shut down in all markets on that date.
Tesla has not yet updated the legalese on its referral page, so we don’t know the specifics yet of how it will be retired. Orders made before April 30th may still qualify for credits if delivered after April 30th, and referral credits already earned may be redeemable after that date (Sawyer Merritt says both of these things will be true, but we don’t know his source for that). Given that credits earned beforehand do have an expiry date, we expect that Tesla will have to honor them until their expiry date, but some rewards may disappear before those expiry dates come.