Tesla Still Excluded From the EV Grant: How to Check

As of 3 August 2026, Tesla remains ineligible for the Electric Car Grant in both Band 1 (£3,750) and Band 2 (£1,500). We've covered the grant on this site before; what's new here is confirming the position hasn't moved, and showing you how to check it for yourself rather than trust any page — including one of ours from a few months back — without a date on it.

How to verify Tesla's eligibility yourself

1. Check the manufacturer requirement, not just the price cap. The scheme requires a manufacturer to hold a verified Science Based Target for emissions. Tesla has not met that bar, which is why it's excluded at a brand level — separately from whether any individual model's price fits under the cap.
2. Look up the live eligible-vehicles list on the scheme's own pages (Honest John and Autocar both maintain checkers cross-referenced against the official criteria — linked in Sources below). Search for "Tesla" directly; an absence from that list is the confirmation, not a guess.
3. Separately check the price gate. Cars over £37,000 (or £42,000 with options) don't get the full grant regardless of manufacturer status. Most Teslas sit above that threshold too — so even if the manufacturer rule changed, price alone would still exclude several UK trims. The two gates are independent; check both.

Three price thresholds, and none of them is the others

The price gate above is one of three numbers a UK EV buyer runs into, and they get mixed up constantly because they are all "about £40,000" and all sound like the same rule. They are not:

• £37,000 — the grant's price cap. Above it, the full grant is off the table whoever made the car. This is the number this page is about.
• £42,000 — the same cap counted with options. The distinction matters because a car under the cap on its base list price can be configured over it, which is a self-inflicted disqualification and the one a buyer can actually control.
• £50,000 — the VED Expensive Car Supplement threshold for zero-emission cars, raised from £40,000 with effect from 1 April 2026 and applied retrospectively to zero-emission cars registered from 1 April 2025. Nothing to do with the grant: it is an annual tax, not a discount.

The third one is the one people miss, and it is the only one on this list that costs money every year rather than once. The supplement is charged on top of the standard rate from a car's second tax year and runs for five years — so a car that crosses that line carries the charge into its sixth year on the road, and into the running costs of whoever owns it in the meantime.

Why the £50,000 line is worth checking before you configure

Two features of that threshold make it easy to get wrong in the direction that costs you.

First, it is assessed on the car's list price, which is not what you paid. A discount, a trade-in or a finance deal does not move you below the line; the published price of the car as specified does. Second, it is options-inclusive in practice, which puts it in the same trap as the grant's £42,000 figure: the last item added in the configurator is the one that can cross the line, and it crosses it for five years of tax rather than for the price of the option.

None of this is a reason to avoid a well-specified car — a supplement of a few hundred pounds a year is not the largest number in a car purchase, and the thresholds themselves get revised. It is a reason to know which side of the line your build sits on before you order rather than when the second year's tax reminder arrives. And it has no bearing on the referral benefit at all: the 650 free Supercharging miles apply the same either way, which is precisely why we keep the two kinds of number apart on this site.

What this means before you order

The Model Y — the UK's best-selling EV — doesn't qualify, and neither does the Model 3, which would otherwise meet the technical criteria on range and price for at least some trims. If you're budgeting a UK Tesla order, don't build the Electric Car Grant into your maths and hope Tesla joins before delivery; nothing in the current facts suggests that's imminent. The referral programme's 650 free Supercharging miles is a separate, unrelated saving that applies regardless of grant eligibility — it's worth claiming on its own merits, not as a substitute for a grant that isn't coming.