You plug in at 11pm, tell the car to be ready by 7am, and go to bed assuming the cheap overnight rate is quietly filling the battery while you sleep. You wake up, check the app, and the car finished charging at 11:40pm. It sat there fully charged and warm for seven hours, and you paid the evening rate for most of it because you set up the wrong schedule.
This happens to a lot of Tesla owners in Turkey, not because the feature is broken, but because the app hides two genuinely different settings under names that sound almost identical. Scheduled Charging and Scheduled Departure solve different problems, and using the wrong one for your situation either wastes money or leaves you with a cold, half-charged car on a winter morning.
Two settings, two different jobs
Open the Tesla app and you'll find both options sitting in the Charging tab, usually one toggle away from each other. They look like variations on the same idea. They aren't.
Scheduled Charging is the simple one. You pick a start time, and the car begins charging at that time, as long as it's plugged in. That's the entire feature. It doesn't know when you're leaving, it doesn't warm the cabin, and it doesn't work backward from anything. If you set it for 1am, charging starts at 1am and runs until it hits your charge limit or you unplug.
Scheduled Departure works the opposite direction. You tell it when you want to leave, and it works backward from that time to decide when charging should start and when preconditioning should kick in. If you set a 7am departure, the car calculates how long it needs to reach your charge limit and how long it needs to warm the battery and cabin, then schedules both to finish right around 7am rather than hours early.
The practical difference shows up the moment your charge time is shorter than the window until departure. A Model 3 Long Range plugged in at 50% overnight on a home charger might only need two to three hours to reach 80%. With Scheduled Charging set for 11pm, that charging finishes around 1am or 2am, long before you actually leave. With Scheduled Departure set for 7am, the same session starts around 4am or 5am instead, finishing right as you walk out the door, with a preconditioned cabin waiting for you.
That gap between "finished charging" and "actually leaving" is where the money problem lives.
Why the gap costs you money in Turkey
Most residential customers in Turkey are on, or can switch to, a multi-rate (çok zamanlı) electricity tariff with three pricing periods instead of one flat rate. The exact boundaries and the exact multiplier shift over time and by distribution region, so check your own bill or your dağıtım şirketi's current tariff table for precise numbers, but the general shape has stayed consistent for years.
| Period | Typical hours | Relative price | |---|---|---| | Gündüz (day) | 06:00 to 17:00 | Baseline | | Puant (peak) | 17:00 to 22:00 | Highest, often 2x gündüz or more | | Gece (night) | 22:00 to 06:00 | Lowest, often 30% to 45% below gündüz |
A car that finishes charging at 1am sat mostly inside the gece window and paid the cheap rate. That part is fine. The problem isn't the charging itself, it's what happens for the five or six hours after. A fully charged battery sitting in a cold garage doesn't draw meaningful power on its own, so you're not burning extra kWh during that gap. What you're actually losing is the preconditioning timing: if you want a warm cabin and a warm battery at 7am, that warming has to happen close to 7am, and if the car already finished its scheduled task hours earlier, you either precondition manually and eat the cost whenever you remember to tap the button, or you skip it and leave in a cold car.
Where real money gets wasted is a slightly different and more common mistake: people set Scheduled Charging for a time that isn't actually inside the cheap window, often because they set it once when they moved onto the multi-rate tariff and never revisited it after their distribution company adjusted the hour boundaries. A charge scheduled for 10pm under an old gece window that has since shifted to 11pm quietly bills part of every session at the puant rate without the owner noticing, since the app shows charging history but doesn't flag which price period you landed in.
The size of the difference depends on how much energy you're actually pulling. A Model Y charging from 30% to 80% at home draws somewhere around 35 to 40 kWh. If half of that session lands in puant instead of gece because the schedule drifted by even an hour, the cost difference on that single charge can run into real money over a month of daily commuting, even before you account for a full house's worth of other appliances running on the same misaligned schedule. If you recently had a Wall Connector installed, this is exactly the moment to double check which tariff your installer or electrician set the schedule around, since installation day pricing assumptions don't always get revisited later.
How preconditioning timing actually works
Preconditioning draws from either the grid, if you're still plugged in, or the battery, if you're not. This is the detail that makes Scheduled Departure worth using even if you don't care about the tariff math.
If your car finishes charging at 2am and you leave at 7am unplugged and un-preconditioned, warming the cabin and battery on a cold morning pulls directly from your stored range. We've measured this in our piece on cold weather range loss: a cold start without preconditioning can cost you meaningful range in the first 20 minutes of driving, on top of the general winter efficiency hit.
If instead the car is still plugged in at 7am because Scheduled Departure timed the whole session to finish right then, that same preconditioning draws from the wall instead of the battery. You leave with a warm cabin, a warmed battery pack ready to accept and deliver power efficiently, and a charge level that hasn't been touched by the warm-up process at all. The cost difference is small in raw kWh, usually a few kWh for a 20 minute precondition in cold weather, but the range difference at the start of your drive is the part that actually matters on a tight morning commute.
Scheduled Departure also lets you add specific days. You can tell it Monday through Friday only, so weekend mornings don't trigger an unwanted 6am preconditioning cycle when you're not actually going anywhere.
Common misconfigurations that quietly cost you
A few setup mistakes come up again and again in owner forums and in support threads, and all of them are easy to fix once you know to check for them.
- Both schedules enabled at once. Some owners turn on Scheduled Charging first, then later discover Scheduled Departure and enable that too without turning the first one off. The two can conflict, and the car's behavior in that case is inconsistent enough that Tesla's own guidance is to use one or the other, never both.
- Departure time left at a default that doesn't match your actual routine. If you set it up once for a 7am office commute and your schedule has since shifted, the car is optimizing preconditioning and charge timing around a departure that no longer happens, which defeats the entire point.
- Charge limit set too high for a short commute. If you only need 50% for your daily driving but you've left the limit at 90% out of habit, Scheduled Departure has to start charging earlier to hit that higher number, pulling part of the session into a more expensive tariff window than necessary.
- No days selected, or the wrong days selected. Scheduled Departure defaults can be easy to misread, and a schedule quietly set for "every day" when you only commute on weekdays means unnecessary preconditioning cycles on Saturday and Sunday mornings.
- Ignoring the tariff shift after a plan change. If you switch electricity providers or your dağıtım şirketi updates the gece window boundaries, a schedule timed around the old hours silently loses its advantage. Check your actual bill every few months, not just the app.
When Charge Now actually beats scheduling
Scheduling makes sense for a predictable daily routine. It stops making sense the moment your routine isn't predictable, and forcing a schedule onto an unpredictable day usually costs you more time than the few cents it might save.
Road trips are the clearest case. If you're charging at a hotel or an Airbnb the night before a long drive, you want the battery full and ready whenever you're ready to leave, not optimized around a tariff window that doesn't apply to a one-night stay. Tap Charge Now and let it run.
Unexpectedly cold mornings are the second case. If you wake up to frost on the windshield and you're leaving in fifteen minutes, don't wait for a scheduled preconditioning cycle that was tuned for a different departure time. Start preconditioning manually from the app or the car itself, and if the battery is low, start charging immediately rather than trusting a schedule that assumed a warmer, more typical morning.
The third case is anytime your plans genuinely change day to day. If you don't leave at the same time most mornings, Scheduled Departure has nothing reliable to work backward from, and you'll get better results just charging when convenient and preconditioning manually a few minutes before you walk out.
Setting it up properly
- Open the Tesla app, go to Charging, and check whether Scheduled Charging is currently on. If it is, and you want to use Scheduled Departure instead, turn Scheduled Charging off first.
- Enable Scheduled Departure and set your actual, typical departure time, not an aspirational one.
- Turn on preconditioning within that same setting so the cabin and battery warm-up is tied to the departure time automatically.
- Set the days that match your real routine. Leave weekends unchecked if you're not commuting.
- Check your charge limit against your actual daily driving need, not a round number you picked once and forgot about. If you're planning a longer drive the next day, bump the limit up manually for that one session instead of leaving it permanently high.
- Revisit your dağıtım şirketi's current multi-rate tariff hours once or twice a year, since the official gece, gündüz, and puant windows do shift, and your schedule should shift with them.
None of this takes more than a few minutes, and it's a one-time setup rather than something you need to touch daily once it's dialed in correctly.
If keeping track of which schedule you're on, how it's performing, and whether your charging is actually landing in the cheap window sounds like more than you want to think about, Volt tracks your charging history in plain language in the background, so you can glance at it occasionally instead of auditing your own electricity bill every month.