Desk notes · tesla referral code
Tesla Referral & Loyalty: What to Check on Delivery Day, Not Before
Everything up to now has been about getting the referral benefit into your order. This is about the appointment where you actually take the car — and the four things worth confirming before you sign.
Our other posts on the March 2026 referral and loyalty overhaul cover ordering-time sequencing and the 12-month credit-expiration clock that starts afterward. This one is about a narrower moment neither of those fully covers: the delivery appointment itself, in person, before you sign anything. Under the post-March-2026 terms, four things are worth confirming right there rather than assuming they carried through correctly from your order.
1. Confirm the vehicle is actually one of the eligible models
Model 3, Model Y and qualifying Cybertruck trims (Premium AWD and Cyberbeast specifically — the Dual Motor AWD Cybertruck is excluded) are the only vehicles that carry a buyer referral benefit since March 2026. If you ordered a Cybertruck, this is the moment to confirm the paperwork shows the correct trim; Model S and Model X carry no referral benefit at all under the current program, a detail that's easy to overlook if you configured the order weeks or months before delivery.
2. Confirm the FSD (Supervised) trial is actually active, not just promised
The trial activates once the vehicle is delivered and the software becomes available on the car — it's a different check than the order-summary line you confirmed when you ordered. At the delivery appointment, or shortly after via the Tesla app, verify that Full Self-Driving (Supervised) shows as active on your specific vehicle. An order-summary line from months earlier is not the same thing as confirmation that it actually landed on the car you're driving home.
3. If you traded in under the loyalty program, check the discount figure on the paperwork
The loyalty discount on eligible new vehicles for existing owners was cut from $1,000 to $500 in the same March 2026 update. If you ordered before fully registering that change, or if a sales conversation referenced the old figure, delivery day — with the actual bill of sale in front of you — is the place to catch a $1,000 figure that should read $500 before you sign.
Eligible-model list, FSD (Supervised) trial activation timing, and the $500 loyalty-discount figure checked against Tesla's Refer and Earn page and reporting on the March 2026 overhaul. All four checks above concern the delivery appointment specifically, not the earlier order step.
4. Write down the Grant Date the moment a credit posts
If you're the referrer, or if a loyalty credit is posting as part of this same delivery, referral and loyalty credits expire 12 months after the Grant Date — the day the credit actually lands in the Tesla app, not the delivery date and not the original order date. Rather than reconstructing this later, note the exact date shown in the app the first time you see the credit appear. That single habit is the difference between knowing your use-by date on day one and guessing at it eleven months from now.
If something doesn't match at the appointment
Raise it with the delivery advisor before you sign, not after. Once a delivery is completed and paperwork is finalized, the same rule that applies to a missed referral at order time tends to apply here too: there is no documented mechanism for Tesla retroactively correcting a benefit after the fact, so the appointment itself is the last easy checkpoint. None of these four checks take more than a couple of minutes, and none of them require anything you haven't already been told at some point in the process — they're just easy to lose track of between the order and the day the car actually shows up.