I Checked Whether My Own Tesla Order Qualifies for the £3,750 Grant

We wrote generally about why Tesla misses the Electric Car Grant in our earlier note this April. What I hadn't done until this week was actually run the check myself, against my own configured order, rather than just stating the rule. Here's exactly what I did, and what I found — so you can repeat it on your own configuration in a few minutes.

Why I bothered checking rather than just quoting the rule

It's one thing to say “most Teslas miss the £37,000 cap” and another to actually have a live order to test it against. I have a Model 3 configured on tesla.com/en_gb, so I used it as the test case rather than a hypothetical.

Gate one: the price cap

My configured Model 3 — a mid-spec build, nothing stripped down — priced above £37,000 on the day I checked. That alone rules it out of both the Band 1 (£3,750) and Band 2 (£1,500) tiers of the 2026 Electric Car Grant. Nothing surprising there — it's what our own eligibility page already says of most UK Tesla configurations.

Gate two: the manufacturer list

The part I hadn't personally verified before was the second gate: guidance covered by Honest John points to a manufacturer-level requirement — verified Science Based Targets — sitting above the price cap entirely. I checked this against gov.uk's own grant guidance rather than taking a single secondary source at its word, and as reported, Tesla isn't currently on the approved list. That means even if my configuration had priced under £37,000, it would still have failed this second, separate test.

What running both checks actually taught me

Doing this myself rather than reading someone else's summary changed how I'd explain it to a buyer. It's tempting to treat “my car's too expensive” as the whole story and stop there. Running the manufacturer check too meant I could tell a friend configuring a cheaper Model 3 (Standard trim, fewer options) with confidence that dropping the price wouldn't have saved the grant for them either — the manufacturer gate would have caught it regardless.

What I checked that isn't grant-related, while I was at it

Since I had the Tesla UK incentives page and gov.uk both open, I also confirmed the two figures that do apply to my order regardless of the grant result: my referral link is attached and shows in the order summary, earning the 650 free Supercharging miles on delivery; and, separately, the UK Supercharger network I'll actually be using sat at 2,747 chargers as of end May 2026, with typical per-kWh pricing in the 25–40p range at the time I checked.

The home-charger grant: the one I do qualify for

Since I rent rather than own outright, I also checked the separate EV Chargepoint Grant — the one for home-charger installations, worth roughly £350 and risen to £500 from 1 April 2026. Unlike the Electric Car Grant, this one isn't gated by manufacturer or car price, and on my own circumstances I do qualify for it. It's a genuinely different scheme from the car-purchase grant, and worth checking separately rather than assuming a “no” on one means “no” on both.

Try it yourself, in the same order

If you're configuring a Tesla, the sequence I'd actually recommend is: check your configured price against the current £37,000 cap on gov.uk, separately confirm whether your car's manufacturer sits on the approved list that same page links to, and then — regardless of either result — open your referral link before you configure, since that benefit doesn't depend on either gate. Do the home-charger grant check separately if it applies to your housing situation.

The honest bottom line

My own configuration failed both Electric Car Grant gates, and I don't expect that to surprise most Tesla buyers reading this. What surprised me, doing the check properly rather than repeating the headline, was how little the price gate mattered on its own — the manufacturer gate would have blocked me either way. I'll re-run this check and update the date here if Tesla's manufacturer status or my own order changes.

← Get a UK referral code

Disclosure: the links above are referral links — using one credits the owner with Tesla Credits at no cost to you, and gives you the buyer benefit. The Emerald Mile is an independent guide and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Tesla, Inc. “Tesla” and “Supercharger” are trademarks of Tesla, Inc., used here nominatively.