Can We Force a Supercharger Not to Use Free Miles?

[nezuko]

We still have miles left to use a Supercharger for free. About to go to a work related road trip where we will be reimbursed for the mileage. Although I have Teslafi to present the charges during the trip, we would still be using up our free miles (which I'd rather save). Can we tell the app to skip using the free miles before plugging in the Supercharger and charge us manually instead? And once we're done with the trip, is it possible to have the app go back to using the free miles for future Supercharging sessions?

I figure this will also be easier on the invoice since it will show the actual charges instead of what Teslafi thinks the charges are.

 

[Sophias_dad]

Don't you get reimbursed for the mileage, not for the money spent on that mileage? Last I saw, the number was like 55 cents a mile, but your company might be different.

 

[bradtem]

There is a time limit on free supercharger miles if you don't have an old car with unlimited. While it would be reasonable to try and only use them during peak hours when it's 59 cents/kwh, Tesla hardly is going to want that so I would not expect them to enable that.

I have about 1000 miles left that are going to expire unused in a couple weeks. That's because I took the policy of charging at "cheaper" places to save the miles for later. For example at my last supercharger before returning home, I would add enough to get home with 10% and fill up at my home price of 13 cents. Whoops, as it turns out from a dollar standpoint. (Still better to have charged slower.) Plus home has jumped to 25 cents, damn you PG&E.

 

[Silicon Desert]

We still have miles left to use a Supercharger for free. About to go to a work related road trip where we will be reimbursed for the mileage. Although I have Teslafi to present the charges during the trip, we would still be using up our free miles (which I'd rather save). Can we tell the app to skip using the free miles before plugging in the Supercharger and charge us manually instead? And once we're done with the trip, is it possible to have the app go back to using the free miles for future Supercharging sessions?

I figure this will also be easier on the invoice since it will show the actual charges instead of what Teslafi thinks the charges are.

Your short answer is no. Frankly, I wouldn't even think about this. As a side note, I do consulting for a lot of companies. I just tell them my mileage from Google maps and get reimbursed. I would use the free miles while you can.

 

[nezuko]

Sophias_dad is correct. The company does charge per mile of the trip, not actual cost at the pump or at the charging stations. This is our first ever business trip using our own vehicle, so we are not familiar with how things are.

Thank you all for the replies!

 

[kilpatds]

Sophias_dad is correct. The company does charge per mile of the trip, not actual cost at the pump or at the charging stations.

Everyone should recall that the reimbursement is expected to help cover ALL the related costs of car ownership. Not just the gas, but also the prorated costs of insurance, depreciation, maintenance (oil changes, tire replacement), etc. $0.625/mile isn't the cost of gas, and isn't expected to be: it's the best quick guess at the total costs, and used to let you avoid calculating the detailed cost.

 

[swaltner]

The IRS rate for reimbursement is a pretty good estimate for me. This is from my spreadsheet that I track vehicle expenses - this was from my 2003 Dodge Ram 1500 pickup that I purchased new and still own. The "vehicle cost" includes about $2,250 in property tax from license plates over the decades, I carried full coverage insurance for the first 16 years of ownership, but recently converted to liability only, over half my service costs were to drop in a rebuilt engine after the original one threw a rod at 10 years and 96k miles, the "vehicle selling price" is an estimate of what I could sell it for on the open market to estimate the total depreciation.

As you can see, fuel costs, even on a gas-guzzling pickup, were only 29% of my total expenses on the vehicle.