Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) doesn’t want customer hogging its superchargers.
To stop customers from leaving their cars parked at supercharging stations, Tesla Motors Inc is introducing a supercharger idle fee. This fee will charge customers 40 cents for each minute they leave their cars at the stations once charging is complete.
The supercharger idle fee isn’t designed to make Tesla Motors Inc any money. Instead, the company claims that it just wants to make sure that the superchargers are available to those that really need them. A blog post from TSLA compared leaving a charged car at a supercharging station to sitting at a gas pump once fueling is complete.
Tesla Motors Inc is hoping to help customers avoid the supercharging idle fee in a couple of ways. The first involves its app. The app will notify customers when their car is almost charged, and again once it is fully charged. The second way is waiving fees for customers that move their vehicles away from the stations within 5 minutes of reaching full charge.
Tesla Motors Inc also says it hopes to avoid this process completely in the future. The company has an interest in creating vehicles that can someday drive themselves away from the supercharging stations once they have a full charge.
Tesla Motors Inc announced last month that it plans to bring an end to free supercharging. This change will go into effect on Jan. 1, 2017. It will only apply to customers that buy their cars after this date. However, these customers will still get 400 kWh of free supercharging credits each year.
