The Benefit Did Not Appear After Delivery. What to Do, in Order

A missing referral benefit is either a delivery problem or an attachment problem, and only one of those is fixable. Sorting out which you have is the first step, and it is an evidence question rather than a support question.

Step 1 — establish whether it was ever attached

Open the order summary you agreed to at checkout, in the Tesla app. Look for the benefit line — in North America, the three-month Full Self-Driving (Supervised) trial shown as included.

• The line is there. The referral attached and something has gone wrong downstream. That is a legitimate support case and you have documentation for it.
• The line was never there. The referral did not attach at checkout, and sources agree it cannot be applied after an order is placed. This is the unwelcome branch, and no amount of escalation changes it.

Step 2 — rule out the eligibility explanations

Before contacting anyone, check the three cases where no benefit was ever due: Model S and Model X have been outside the programme since March 2026; Cybertruck Dual Motor AWD is excluded while Premium AWD and Cyberbeast qualify; and a used or third-party-placed order sits outside the new-order flow the programme is built around. If one of those applies, the missing benefit is the programme working as documented.

Step 3 — collect the evidence before you write

Four things, and they take five minutes: a screenshot of the order summary showing the benefit line; the order number; the delivery date; and a screenshot of the car's software screen showing FSD not active. A support conversation that opens with those four items is a different conversation from one that opens with a description.

Step 4 — ask the narrow question

Not "why has my referral not worked" but "my order summary shows the referral benefit as included; it is not active on the car; can you apply it." Narrow questions with attached evidence route better than broad ones, and the narrow version keeps the conversation on the one thing that is actually fixable.

What the referrer can and cannot do

Very little, and it is worth telling them so they do not spend a week trying. They cannot re-attach a referral to your order, cannot transfer credits to you — credits are documented as non-transferable — and cannot see your order. What they can tell you is whether the referral shows as pending on their side, which is a useful signal: a pending entry means Tesla recognised the referral, which supports the "attached but not delivered" branch.

If it was never attached

Two things remain available, and they are genuinely worth knowing rather than being consolation prizes. A vehicle order and an energy order are separate transactions, so a future solar or Powerwall purchase carries its own referral opportunity. And a second vehicle later is unaffected by having missed it this time — there is no per-buyer limit on using a referral link.

What not to do

Three things, each of which wastes time this desk has watched people spend. Do not hunt for a "better" code: if the benefit line was missing because the car was ineligible or the session carried no referral, a different code changes nothing. Do not pay anyone for a replacement — a referral costs nothing, and any page charging for one is not a referral service. And do not accept a vague reassurance that it "will show up after delivery" without asking which screen it will show up on; the benefit is either on the order or it is not.

The desk’s read

The programme has a single irreversible moment and almost no signposting around it. That design is why this failure is common, and why the useful writing about it is preventative rather than remedial: the order summary before payment is the only screen where the information is actionable. Everything after that is triage.