I have a 2018 Model 3 that is registered under my email address. In September 2019 my wife bought a Model X and registered it under her email address. One of the big selling points of buying the 2019 Model X was the free supercharging. The problem of having the 2 Teslas registered under 2 email addresses was that in the mobile app we had to log out and log in with each email address to see the status of each Tesla. At the dealership they told us we could request that the accounts be merged into a single email account so we could see both Teslas on one account. So I sent in an email request to do just that. Somehow in the process of merging the accounts we lost the free supercharging on the Model X. We contacted customer support but they say changing the email constitutes a change in ownership and therefore the free supercharging has been lost. This is a terrible policy if this is true. I have called and emailed customer support multiple times and they are sticking to their guns and refuse to reinstate our free supercharging. Has anyone else experienced this? What else can we do besides taking legal action? Tesla's customer support has been terrible.
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Lost Supercharging by merging accounts
- Thread starter Smoovies
- Start date
Techniques
Member
Wow...sorry to hear this happened to you. I was very close having my wife create her own account and then merging them together before we got our X, but decided to have them under my account and share my account password with her. We would have been in the same boat. This is a horrible policy and should honestly be easy to fix on Tesla's end. I am not sure if emailing the referral program could get you somewhere: [email protected]
I set ours up to have two different tesla accounts but I contacted customer service and was able to give my wife's account access to the car as well. I guess this isn't too different than having just one account shared but I wasn't sure how well being logged into the same account in multiple instances would play out. This has worked pretty well for us.
Best bet is to escalate and provide proof that ownership did not change.
Also, you can add app access to a secondary contact through the tesla.com site. Do this for both of your accounts and both cars will show up in each.
It might be too late for you but others shouldn't have to merge accounts. If you just set up a secondary contact on Tesla's site, you can instantly share your car in the app with another driver, such as your wife. There's no need to email or call Tesla and the permissions take effect immediately.
ChadS
Last tank of gas: March 2009
Sorry to hear, OP. I see the situation they are trying to avoid, but it sure sucks for you and they should definitely correct it.
I didn't have the same problem, but something mildly similar - I moved and changed my account address, but my referral rewards were still being sent to the old address. I contacted customer support to change it, and the guy I was corresponding with said it didn't matter what proof I offered for the address change, he would only change the address for the referral rewards if I sent email from the original account. Which isn't an actual email account, it is a forwarding record. I pointed that out, but he insisted they needed the email and if I didn't send it, then it would be my fault if I didn't get the referral rewards. He refused to escalate or consider other options.
It's not that the change was hard to make. I sent email to my salesperson and she called me back within 15 minutes and the change had been made. Perhaps the support people are strongly discouraged from escalating anything that they don't know how to handle?
I didn't have the same problem, but something mildly similar - I moved and changed my account address, but my referral rewards were still being sent to the old address. I contacted customer support to change it, and the guy I was corresponding with said it didn't matter what proof I offered for the address change, he would only change the address for the referral rewards if I sent email from the original account. Which isn't an actual email account, it is a forwarding record. I pointed that out, but he insisted they needed the email and if I didn't send it, then it would be my fault if I didn't get the referral rewards. He refused to escalate or consider other options.
It's not that the change was hard to make. I sent email to my salesperson and she called me back within 15 minutes and the change had been made. Perhaps the support people are strongly discouraged from escalating anything that they don't know how to handle?
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Yoitskenn
Member
@Smoovies: Just experienced the exact same thing. Was told by customer support to transfer the vehicle to my other account. No warning that Free Supercharging would be lost. No warning when transferring online either and now being told it's irreversible. Even transferring the vehicle back to the initial account won't fix it. Did you get your situation sorted out? So frustrating!
Sounds like it's time formaebitrstion
Just because they say changing email accounts constitutes change of ownership doesn't make it true. Obviously it doesn't if you STILL own the car. What's worse is that they did what they said they had to do in order to merge the accounts.
My suggestion is to keep on trying escalate it. Tweet on their page https://twitter.com/Tesla and tag Elon. Post a link here so we can retweet.
You may ultimately have to sue through arbitration. Clearly you have a slam dunk and they will restore your supercharging long before it ever gets to that point.
Seeing crap like this makes me want to cancel my MXP order and never deal with Tesla again.
Just because they say changing email accounts constitutes change of ownership doesn't make it true. Obviously it doesn't if you STILL own the car. What's worse is that they did what they said they had to do in order to merge the accounts.
My suggestion is to keep on trying escalate it. Tweet on their page https://twitter.com/Tesla and tag Elon. Post a link here so we can retweet.
You may ultimately have to sue through arbitration. Clearly you have a slam dunk and they will restore your supercharging long before it ever gets to that point.
Seeing crap like this makes me want to cancel my MXP order and never deal with Tesla again.
Ron97062
Member
What a ridiculous policy! Many people use e-mail addresses from their ISP, employer, or a personal domain, and e-mail addresses can change in the course normal modern life. I'm curious, some someone gets married and changes their last name, would Tesla also call that a change of ownership?
Or your personal email account gets hacked and isn't recoverable. You now have a new gmail account and now free supercharging. There's no way this is the policy. Whatever Tesla CS rep said changing emails constitutes change of ownership is just flat out wrong.
I'm pretty sure that you can change the email address on an account without triggering this. What triggers it is moving the vehicle to a different account.
I suspect they are trying to weed out all the owners who are trying to transfer free SC to others using burner email accounts. You can find people discussing this "hack" throughout the forums. Unfortunately, it sounds like legit email changes are getting caught up.
And on the flip side, if you have non transferrable free supercharging for life and only have one Tesla on your account, you could sell it and give up the account login and password and change the email to the person you sold it too and the new owner should be able to keep the free supercharging. If Tesla eventually catches this by being notified by the DMV of a change of ownership, then Tesla shouldn't remove free supercharging just because it was moved to a different account since that doesn't necessarily mean ownership changed.
Why would Tesla be notified by the DMV that ownership of the vehicle has changed? I don’t see that happening. I’m guessing that that does not currently happen. This information IS needed for recalls but it seems that forwarding the new owner’s information is generally up to the prior owner of the vehicle, upon receiving such a recall notice for a vehicle that he no longer owns.
Sounds like the best plan is to use a disposable” email account from the very beginning so that you can transfer the Tesla account and your original disposable email account to the new owner, who could then change the password.
Just thinking out loud.
I have no idea what's happening behind the scenes, but it's not unreasonable that there is some service provider like CarFax that offers an automated data stream for a given set of search params, i.e. Teslas. We know that Tesla is actively trying to remove features from cars and they want those liabilities off the books. I think Tesla would be more motivated to know when vehicles change hands given there is money at stake. Recalls? They don't care about those
