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Tesla Model S Charging Costs in Australia
Tesla Motors seen as a key sponsor of Web Directions in Sydney, Australia.
More than 2 years after the it first went on sale in the US the Model S arrived in Australia in late December 2014. As an early owner of the Model S the car generates a lot of interest from friends, neighbours and the general public when you’re out and about. One of the most common questions is how much does it cost to run. We need a new language to describe this as litre’s per 100km doesn’t work and a “full tank” in a Model S is less than a normal tank in a modern petrol car. The answer I find people find easiest to understand is $11 for a full charge which lasts for around 500kms.
Compared to a petrol car this is great, current models will give you 500 – 1000kms from a tank but you’ll spend $50 to $100 to fill them up (at the current, and relatively cheap fuel prices).
Victorian Government’s initiative called for an expansive roll out of digital smart meters across residential and small businesses. Source: Energy Australia
To understand where the $11 comes from let’s dig into electricity pricing in Australia a little more. Historically homes have been configured with analog meters. All the power we use is charged at a flat rate day and night. Optionally an off peak circuit was often installed which was only connected to the hot water service. Available into two variants supply is remotely controlled by the electricity company for circa 6 or 12 hours per day.
More recently smart meters are being installed on new dwellings and with consumers that have added solar photovoltaics to their home. In certain states such as Victoria blanket rollouts of smart meters have been known to occur. Once installed electricity is charged on tariffs that vary across different times of the day for weekdays and weekends. Tariffs vary across networks but generally consist of a peak morning or late afternoon & evening period, shoulder during the remaining waking hours on weekdays and across the weekend and off peak for overnight.
Charging Costs and Meter Options in Australia
For both analog and smart meters the difference in tariffs between their maximum and minimum are material. From a low of circa $0.10/kWh on off peak to a high of $0.50/kWh in peak periods.
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Analog Meter
- If you’re on an analog meter you can wire your charger to a standard circuit and charge at any time, or choose one of the two controlled load circuits to get cheaper power but with less control. Note that you can’t mix standard and controlled circuits so you’ll have to choose one or the other. Having the electric company control when to supply your electricity may not work for you if you plan on taking consistent high length trips in your Model S each day. Especially since you’ll likely require a nightly charge with a guarantee of no interruption.
Smart Meter
- If you’re on a smart meter, find out what time your off peak starts, configure your Tesla Model S to start charging at this time, plug in every night and you’ll almost certainly be charging on the cheapest power all the time. The off peak periods are long enough to get a full charge on a standard 32 Amp charger for all but the most depleted of batteries. On the rare occasion that you can’t complete your charge during the off peak period you’ll simply push the small remaining part into a shoulder or peak tariff.
A smart meter provides much greater flexibility, but the real cost of changing from an analog needs to take into consideration your whole home.
The average Australian home uses around 20kWh of electricity per day or and the average vehicle travels 270kms per week. In Model S terms this equates to 140 kWh per week on your home and 55-65 kWh per week to charge the car.
Obviously these figures vary enormously depending on your personal home and driving habits but car charging is likely to remain the smaller part.
What about charging from solar? Everyone that has solar has a smart meter and hence the ability to control the price they pay for the electricity which is used for charging their car. Households that installed solar early are on feed-in tariffs which pay them for all or just the excess power that they produce. In the majority of cases these rates are much higher than the cheapest power available over night. Those that aren’t on solar power are mostly being paid feed in tariffs which are only marginally lower than the price they pay for power over night.
ALSO SEE: One Telsa owner’s journey with installing photovoltaic cells through SolarCity
Most users will be better off using their solar in their home or selling it then buying cheap power overnight to charge their car. There are certainly users for whom it would be cheaper to charge from the power generated through their solar system, but the cost and complexity of making it work is unlikely to stack up. Some form of power router is needed that can take into account usage by other appliances in your home, the tariffs, the amount of charge your car needs each day and the potentially intermittent supply of sun on any given day.
LEARN MORE: How to reduce your electricity usage at home in Australia?
Elon Musk
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla confirmed HW3 vehicles cannot run unsupervised FSD, replacing its free upgrade promise with a discounted trade-in.
Tesla has officially confirmed that early vehicles with its Autopilot Hardware 3 (HW3) will not be capable of unsupervised Full Self-Driving, while extending a path forward for legacy owners through a discounted trade-in program. The announcement came by way of Elon Musk in today’s Tesla Q1 2026 earnings call.
🚨 Our LIVE updates on the Tesla Earnings Call will take place here in a thread 🧵
Follow along below: pic.twitter.com/hzJeBitzJU
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
The history here matters. HW3 launched in April 2019, and Tesla sold Full Self-Driving packages to owners on the understanding that the hardware was sufficient for full autonomy. Some owners paid between $8,000 and $15,000 for FSD during that period. For years, as FSD’s AI models grew more demanding, HW3 vehicles fell progressively further behind, eventually landing on FSD v12.6 in January 2025 while AI4 vehicles moved to v13 and then v14. When Musk acknowledged in January 2025 that HW3 simply could not reach unsupervised operation, and alluded to a difficult hardware retrofit.
The near-term offering is more concrete. Tesla’s head of Autopilot Ashok Elluswamy confirmed on today’s call that a V14-lite will be coming to HW3 vehicles in late June, bringing all the V14 features currently running on AI4 hardware. That is a meaningful software update for owners who have been frozen at v12.6 for over a year, and it represents genuine effort to keep older hardware relevant. Unsupervised FSD for vehicles is now targeted for Q4 2026 at the earliest, with Musk describing it as a gradual, geography-limited rollout.
For HW3 owners, the over-the-air V14-lite update is welcomed, and the discounted trade-in path at least acknowledges an old obligation. What happens next with the trade-in pricing will define how this chapter ultimately gets written. If Tesla prices the hardware path fairly, acknowledges what early adopters are owed, and delivers V14-lite on the June timeline it committed to today, it has a real opportunity to convert one of the longest-running sore subjects among early adopters into a loyalty story.
Elon Musk
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Tesla’s Optimus factory in Texas targets 10 million robots yearly, with 5.2 million square feet under construction.
Tesla’s Q1 2026 Update Letter, released today, confirms that first generation Optimus production lines are now well underway at its Fremont, California factory, with a pilot line targeting one million robots per year to start. Of bigger note is a shared aerial image of a large piece of land adjacent to Gigafactory Texas, that Tesla has prominently labeled “Optimus factory site preparation.”
Permit documents show Tesla is seeking to add over 5.2 million square feet of new building space to the Giga Texas North Campus by the end of 2026, at an estimated construction investment of $5 billion to $10 billion. The longer term production target for that facility is 10 million Optimus units per year. Giga Texas already sits on 2,500 acres with over 10 million square feet of existing factory floor, and the North Campus expansion is being built to support multiple projects, including the dedicated Optimus factory, the Terafab chip fabrication facility (a joint Tesla/SpaceX/xAI venture), a Cybercab test track, road infrastructure, and supporting facilities.
Credit: TESLA
Texas makes strategic sense beyond the existing infrastructure. The state’s tax structure, lower labor costs relative to California, and the proximity to Tesla’s AI training cluster Cortex 1 and 2, both located at Giga Texas and now totaling over 230,000 H100 equivalent GPUs, means the Optimus software stack and the factory producing the hardware will share the same campus. Tesla’s Q1 report also confirmed completion of the AI5 chip tape out in April, the inference processor designed specifically to power Optimus units in the field.
As Teslarati reported, the Texas facility is intended to house Optimus V4 production at full scale. Musk told the World Economic Forum in January that Tesla plans to sell Optimus to the public by end of 2027 at a price between $20,000 and $30,000, stating, “I think everyone on earth is going to have one and want one.” He has previously pegged long term demand for general purpose humanoid robots at over 20 billion units globally, citing both consumer and industrial use cases.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) reported its earnings for the first quarter of 2026 on Wednesday afternoon. Here’s what the company reported compared to what Wall Street analysts expected.
The earnings results come after Tesla reported a miss on vehicle deliveries for the first quarter, delivering 358,023 vehicles and building 408,386 cars during the three-month span.
As Tesla transitions more toward AI and sees itself as less of a car company, expectations for deliveries will begin to become less of a central point in the consensus of how the quarter is perceived.
Nevertheless, Tesla is leaning on its strong foundation as a car company to carry forward its AI ambitions. The first quarter is a good ground layer for the rest of the year.
Tesla Q1 2026 Earnings Results
Tesla’s Earnings Results are as follows:
- Non-GAAP EPS – $0.41 Reported vs. $0.36 Expected
- Revenues – $22.387 billion vs. $22.35 billion Expected
- Free Cash Flow – $1.444 billion
- Profit – $4.72 billion
Tesla beat analyst expectations, so it will be interesting to see how the stock responds. IN the past, we’ve seen Tesla beat analyst expectations considerably, followed by a sharp drop in stock price.
On the same token, we’ve seen Tesla miss and the stock price go up the following trading session.
Tesla will hold its Q1 2026 Earnings Call in about 90 minutes at 5:30 p.m. on the East Coast. Remarks will be made by CEO Elon Musk and other executives, who will shed some light on the investor questions that we covered earlier this week.
You can stream it below. Additionally, we will be doing our Live Blog on X and Facebook.
Q1 2026 Earnings Call at 4:30pm CT https://t.co/pkYIaGJ32y
— Tesla (@Tesla) April 22, 2026
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
