Tesla cuts Supercharger prices back down after customer backlash over increase

Last week, we published a report about Tesla drastically increasing Supercharger prices around the world, but now the automaker is reducing the price hike after a backlash from customers.

Tesla Supercharger Price Increase

As we reported last week, Tesla is moving away from its per state/region pricing structure to implement a per station pricing structure in order to get more comprehensive prices based on local electricity rates and demand charges.

But the change in the structure is also coming with an overall significant increase in price.

At the time, we estimated that the prices are about 33% higher across most markets.

For example, the price in New York used to be $0.24 per kWh state-wide after the last increase and now downtown New York City locations went up to $0.32/kWh.

In California, prices went from $0.26 per kWh to ranging from $0.32 to $0.36 per kWh in the charging stations that we verified.

All European markets also saw some important price increases with most markets paying between 0.28 and 0.32 euros per kWh.

As we noted in our report, the cost of Supercharging was still less than gas, but Tesla’s prices were becoming less competitive than some third-party charging stations.

It resulted in a customer backlash with over 1,000 comments on our article about the situation and several social media posts – many of them unhappy about the increase while others were defending the move.

Tesla reduces Supercharger price hike

Now Tesla told Electrek that it listened to customer feedback and decided to reduce the Supercharger price increase by 10% globally.

After the price increase last week, the average price in the US was $0.31 per kWh.

It is now down to $0.28 per kWh

Norway was at 1,40 NOK per kWh before the increase. It went up to 1,86 NOK per kWh last week and it is now down to 1.70 NOK per kWh after Tesla adjusted the prices today.

Electrek’s Take

Nice to see that Tesla is listening to customer feedback and making this new price increase more reasonable.

It is still a little high in some markets, but we explain why that can be the case in our last article about it, especially with demand charges, which can be extremely steep for charging station operators.

Hopefully, Tesla can get those prices under control because they can’t keep going up at that rate without affecting the economic benefits of the Supercharger network.