Tesla referral code France

Home charging or Supercharging: the 12-month plan, step by step

Published August 10, 2026 · verified July 13, 2026

A quarter-by-quarter plan for choosing between home charging and Supercharging in your first year, then revisiting the referral's km-vs-€ choice with real data.

The problem this plan solves

Most guides explain charging at a single moment — at a Supercharger, or at home — but few say how to balance the two over time. Here's a 12-month plan for a first-time buyer who wants to build real habits instead of guessing.

Months 1–3: observe before you decide

1. Charge at home by default if you can (a plug or a home charger): in the large majority of cases it's the cheaper rate, because it follows your own electricity contract rather than the variable Supercharger price.
2. Save Superchargers for long trips, checking the price shown live in the app every time — never a number remembered from a previous visit.
3. Track, in the app's charging history, the share of your kWh charged at home versus at a Supercharger each month.

Months 4–6: your first real numbers

After one quarter, compare your actual history to the working assumption set out in our page on the cost of charging (€0.42/kWh outside a subscription). If you rarely charge at a Supercharger, a Supercharging subscription probably isn't worth it for you; if long trips are frequent, redo the math with your own mileage.

Months 7–9: revisit the referral's km-vs-€ choice

This is the right moment to look back at the choice made at order time between 2000 km of Supercharging and €250 off. With six to nine months of real history, you now know whether you're a "heavy Supercharger user" or a "home charger" — see our worked example to convert the kilometres into real value for your own usage.

Months 10–12: close out the year and adjust

• Check the validity of your credits if you're a referrer yourself: referrer credits stay valid for roughly 12 months — don't let them expire unused.
• Recalculate your real home rate if your electricity contract changed during the year (off-peak hours, a new plan): the comparison with Supercharging is only valid with an up-to-date rate.
• Set your habits for next year instead of starting from scratch: by now you have real history, more reliable than any starting assumption.

The two measurements the plan runs on — and the French wrinkle

Every month above asks you to compare two costs, so it's worth being precise about what to write down. Two numbers, taken the same way each time, are enough — and taking them badly is the main reason a year of logging produces a conclusion you can't trust.

• Kilometres, from the odometer. Not the car's estimate of consumption, not an app's average. One reading, same day each month.
• Energy paid for, from the meter or the wallbox. At home, what the meter or the charger's own counter recorded. At a Supercharger, what the invoice says. Both are amounts you actually paid, which makes them comparable; a car-reported figure and a billed figure are not.

Then the part specific to France, and it can matter more than the home-versus-Supercharger question the plan is built around: if you're on a peak/off-peak tariff, when you charge moves the number more than where you charge. Two households on identical mileage can land a long way apart purely because one charges during heures creuses and the other plugs in at dinner time. So record one extra thing each month — roughly what share of your home charging happened off-peak.

With that third figure, a disappointing month becomes diagnosable rather than mysterious: if your cost per kilometre rose, you can see whether you drove further, charged more on the road, or simply charged at the wrong hours. Without it, all three look the same in the data, and the plan tells you that something changed without telling you what.

What this plan doesn't replace

No step in this plan replaces checking the live price in the app before you plug in: the Supercharger rate varies by stall and by time slot, a reality neither this plan nor any other site can fix in advance.

Key takeaways

• Home by default, Superchargers for long trips, history tracked month by month.
• At the midpoint (months 7–9), revisit the referral's km-vs-€ choice with real data, not a starting estimate.
• At year-end, check referrer credit validity (~12 months) and refresh your home rate.

Supercharger rate assumption (€0.42/kWh) and figures verified July 13, 2026; your real cost depends on your electricity contract, your vehicle and your trips.