May 2026 Trip, Massachusetts to Minnesota Roundtrip (3100 miles)

[gnr3312]

When charging at a Tesla SC station using Plug&Charge, you pay a top rate, sometimes as high as $0.77/kWh. However, if you have a Tesla membership, and initiate the charge with your phone, you can get the same rate as Tesla drivers. Here are some details.

Summary from Perplexity
Tesla’s Supercharging Membership for non-Tesla EVs doesn’t give a fixed percentage discount; instead, it lets you pay the same per‑kWh rate as Tesla owners, which typically avoids about a 40% price premium that non-members pay on average.

How the “discount” works

• Without membership, non-Tesla EVs usually pay about 40% more than Teslas at Superchargers on average, according to Tesla’s own description and industry analyses.
• With the Supercharging Membership (about 12.99 USD/month in the U.S.), a non-Tesla EV is billed at the Tesla owner rate when you start the session via the Tesla app.
• In practical terms, that often translates to roughly 0.10–0.20 USD/kWh less than the walk‑up non-member rate, depending on location and time.

For example, one California data point shows non-member pricing at 0.60 USD/kWh and member (Tesla-rate) pricing at 0.47 USD/kWh, which is around a 22% reduction for that site. Other reports and Tesla’s own materials frame the gap as “around 40%” on average, but it’s site- and time-dependent rather than a universal fixed discount.

But in this case you’d need to charge more than 100 hours per month to realize any savings over the monthly fee, no? Or is my math wrong?

With membership
$.47 x 100 =$47.00 + monthly fee $12.99 = $59.99

No membership
$.60 x 100 =$60.00

Sponsored

 

[snstevens]

But in this case you’d need to charge more than 100 hours per month to realize any savings over the monthly fee, no? Or is my math wrong?

With membership
$.47 x 100 =$47.00 + monthly fee $12.99 = $59.99

No membership
$.60 x 100 =$60.00

We’re talking units of energy (kWh) not time. The stats for the 2020-2024 Taycan Performance Battery Plus (PB+) are: 83.7 kWh usable (93.4 kWh gross). On a road trip you are likely adding 50-70 kWH of energy to the battery at each charging stop, so your break even point is after the second stop.

 

[cometguy]

@cometguy Thanks for the trip report with details about charging.

I have not been on any road trips with Taycan in quite a while but I will be doing some soon.

I noticed that for charging networks that are part of Porsche's chargepoint network - ChargePoint, EV Connect®, EVgo®, Flo®, and Ionna™ networks - you indicated you activated charging with credit cards or some other method than using MyPorsche app.

Does MyPorsche app activation not work, or do you prefer not to use it?

MyPorsche app seems to show that it can activate Tesla Supercharger charging. Any experience with that?

I have only used MyPorsche app for checking SoC while charging for the most part. I've not thought to use it for much else, honestly. Perhaps I should; I know it's been upgraded in the past year or so. I do have a Porsche account for plug-and-charge at EA stations, but I never use the phone app for that. That said, I should try using my Porsche phone app for some of those new-to-Porsche networks that you just mentioned; I'd thought there were some problems, but didn't know that Ionna and Flo and EVgo and EVConnect were available via the Porsche phone app. My reason for using them would be if RFID or credit cards don't work, as a back-up.

I'm all-to-often in situations on road trips where my cellphone signal is weak when charging. So I use phone apps rarely, as indicated in my report -- always the Tesla iPhone app when I'm at Tesla stations. I just have found iPhone apps for charging to be more problematical than using RFID cards and credit cards, so I just avoid using my iPhone whenever possible, as a rule. The fastest initiation of any charging is almost always anyplace that takes my Chargepoint RFID card (the most widely used RFID card in the USA) -- just about 5 or 10 seconds.

 

[snstevens]

I have only used MyPorsche app for checking SoC while charging for the most part. I've not thought to use it for much else, honestly. Perhaps I should; I know it's been upgraded in the past year or so. I do have a Porsche account for plug-and-charge at EA stations, but I never use the phone app for that. That said, I should try using my Porsche phone app for some of those new-to-Porsche networks that you just mentioned; I'd thought there were some problems, but didn't know that Ionna and Flo and EVgo and EVConnect were available via the Porsche phone app. My reason for using them would be if RFID or credit cards don't work, as a back-up.

I'm all-to-often in situations on road trips where my cellphone signal is weak when charging. So I use phone apps rarely, as indicated in my report -- always the Tesla iPhone app when I'm at Tesla stations. I just have found iPhone apps for charging to be more problematical than using RFID cards and credit cards, so I just avoid using my iPhone whenever possible, as a rule. The fastest initiation of any charging is almost always anyplace that takes my Chargepoint RFID card (the most widely used RFID card in the USA) -- just about 5 or 10 seconds.

When I stated that you need to use the phone app to start the session, I didn’t clarify that you’re using the app for the energy supplier you’ve chosen. In the case of Tesla supercharger network you are going to have to use the Tesla app.

I believe the same thing is true for other charging partners of Porsche if they offer discounts. When you use Plug&Charge on a Taycan you’re always getting the rack rate.

Sponsored