2026.26, and the two settings worth changing today
Most software news is not referral news. Two items in this release genuinely help you spend a mileage reward before it expires.
Release 2026.26 began rolling out in early August 2026 with Preferred Routes, Automatic Navigation, Grok commands, Apple Music and Supercharger Search. If you are holding 650 referral miles on a six-month clock, two of those are worth acting on today.
Setting 1 — use Supercharger Search when you plan, not when you panic
Finding a Supercharger has never been hard; the map always showed them. Search answers a different question: is there a stall at the place I already intend to stop. That is precisely the task for someone routing deliberately to spend an allowance, and doing it at the planning stage rather than mid-journey is what turns intention into a spent reward.
Setting 2 — turn on Preferred Routes if you drive the same roads
It biases navigation toward roads you actually use. Combined with the above, "route via a Supercharger" becomes a default rather than a per-trip decision — and defaults are what beat a deadline.
What is not referral-relevant, stated plainly
Grok commands, Apple Music, and the comfort features alongside them. Good features, no referral consequence. Attaching one would be manufactured, and this guide would rather be trusted on the two items that matter.
Why software cannot help with the important failure
Because it manages a reward you already have. A referral cannot be attached after an order is placed, so a car delivered on the newest build with nothing attached has no benefit for any feature to interact with. The order summary protects the reward's existence; the car protects its spending.
Nor can it extend a deadline
An unspent allowance lapses six months from the Grant Date, with a 30-day warning email, no reissue and no transfer. The only extension mechanism in the programme applies to the sharer's Tesla Credits, where a further successful referral moves the whole balance to twelve months from the newest Grant Date.
The practical five minutes
Update the car, turn on Preferred Routes, search for a Supercharger on the route of your next long trip, and put that trip in the calendar inside the first eight weeks of your six-month window. That sequence is the entire practical content of this release from a referral point of view.
Why the two useful features are useful for the same reason
Both reduce friction on a repeated action. A mileage reward is not redeemed with a decision the way credits are — it is consumed by driving, a few sessions at a time, and every session needs a small planning step. Take that step from "open the map and pan around" to "type a place name at the planning stage", and the number of sessions that actually happen inside six months rises. That is the whole mechanism by which software touches the value of a UK referral, and it is worth five minutes of setup rather than a general resolution to charge publicly more often.
One European footnote
FSD trials in Europe now carry an end-of-trip driver-attentiveness grade, introduced in Amsterdam in August 2026. It does not apply to a UK referral, which is Supercharging miles rather than a software trial — but it is a fair picture of what a supervised-driving trial asks of a driver in the markets that have one.
Sources
Checked against Tesla’s own en_gb pages on
2 September 2026. UK programme terms differ from the US and change
often — re-verify at
tesla.com/en_gb
before you rely on any figure here.