In the excitement over all the new changes announced for the Tesla Model 3 late Thursday night last week, one change to existing owners almost went unnoticed.
Early Friday morning Drive Tesla was first to report that our Model 3, which was previously subscribed to Premium Connectivity, was no longer showing a renewal date on the in-car display. Instead it was saying the package was included, and our Tesla account no longer had the option to manage the subscription.
Why did Tesla give free Premium Connectivity?
The speculation soon began, with many saying it was a bug that would soon be fixed. Four days later and Canadian owners are still reporting to us they also received the free upgrade.
A more plausible reason that Tesla began upgrading customers for free was a recent class-action lawsuit filed in Quebec over the “unilateral modification or termination of the connectivity service for Tesla vehicles purchased in Quebec.”
Tonight Tesla confirmed that as a “gesture of goodwill”, Premium Connectivity was added to a “limited population of owners” for free for the lifetime of their ownership.
Who should get free Premium Connectivity?
So that answers the question of why it started appearing, but who exactly is included in the “limited population” of owners?
After publishing our report, we received more than two hundred responses from owners all across Canada saying they too had been upgraded to free Premium Connectivity. We took a look at the data to see if there was a pattern, and we believe we have a rough answer.
The responses came from owners with every type of Model 3, including the mythical Mid-Range variant. While there were some outliers on either end of the data, there was a clear “line in the sand”.
The vast majority of owners (95%+) who had received the free upgrade had purchased or received their Model 3 between March 2019 and March 2020. There was also a large portion of Standard Range Plus (SR+) owners represented in the data.
There were a handful of owners who purchased as far back as July 2018 that supposedly also got the upgrade. Some owners from March 2020 also reported they did not receive it, so it appears there was some kind of cut-off for that month.
The dates noted in the lawsuit above include any Model 3 buyer between July 1, 2018 and May 18, 2020. While the two sets of dates don’t quite line up with each other, they are pretty close together, so this move by Tesla is likely a preemptive one in response to the lawsuit.
Have you been upgraded to Premium Connectivity? Does your car fall outside of the dates we suggest? Let us know in the comments below.
