Frequently asked questions

Two ways, from the home page. Start trip records today's driving — every drive until you press Finish trip joins into one trip, and a forgotten trip closes itself at midnight. For a multi-day road trip, schedule it with start and end dates — every drive between those dates becomes one trip, one map, one card, even across hotel nights.

No — and we no longer even ask it anything. The car streams its own readings while it's awake and driving, and says nothing while it sleeps. Parked at a hotel or on Sentry, it sleeps exactly as it would otherwise. Because the car decides when to send, a drive starts recording as it pulls away rather than whenever the next check happened to land.

Read-only, and only what trips need: location while recording, battery level, charging state, speed, power, and temperatures. It can never send a command to the car. You can revoke access anytime from your Tesla account's security settings or disconnect under Settings here. The full story — token encryption, scopes, deletion — is on the security page.

Distance comes from the car's odometer, and energy from its own lifetime energy counters — both read straight off the car rather than inferred, so Wh/mi is measured rather than estimated. Energy is counted only while the car is driving and is net of regenerative braking, so it's what the car actually spent moving — not the extra draw from sitting parked with the climate on between drives. Charging costs aren't estimates either: they're your actual billed Supercharger sessions from Tesla, matched to each stop, down to the kWh on the invoice. FSD miles come from the car's own self-driving odometer.

Yes, and you don't log anything. Your car keeps its own lifetime self-driving odometer; we read it at the start and end of a trip, and the difference is that trip's FSD miles — shown as a share of the drive, on the trip page, the share page, and the card.

The car reports that counter in whole miles, so a stretch shorter than a mile may not register, and a trip under a mile shows the miles rather than a percentage. Everything else is exact.

Tap any drive leg for its telemetry: four charts on a shared time axis — speed, elevation, power draw with regen dipping below zero, and outside/cabin temperature. Each chart names its own unit and carries that metric's headline beside it: average speed, feet climbed, peak regen. The caption line adds wind — speed, direction, and whether it was a head- or tailwind for that leg's direction of travel. Tap a charging stop for its charge curve: power tapering as the battery fills.

Elevation and weather come from public sources (Copernicus terrain data and Open-Meteo) matched to your route, so even older trips get them. Speed, power, and temperatures are recorded live during the drive, so they appear on trips recorded after mid-July 2026.

A gap means there was nothing to record there, not that something went wrong. The car only streams while it's awake and moving — park and it goes quiet so it can fall asleep. Step out for photos or lunch and that stretch has no readings, so the lines break rather than drawing a straight line across time nobody measured.

Gaps now match the stop that caused them. They used to run wider: readings were taken on a fixed schedule, so a stop that ended during a quiet spell showed a longer break than it deserved. The car resumes streaming the moment it moves. A leg's duration skips these stretches, which is why it can read shorter than the span of its own time axis.

Losing signal doesn't leave a gap either. The car buffers what it recorded and sends it when it reconnects, so a stretch with no coverage fills itself in afterwards.

Two things that don't leave gaps: stops where you never shift into Park — you'll see speed dip to zero instead — and charging stops, which split the drive into separate legs. How the recording works goes through it properly.

Graphs need at least a few minutes of recorded samples. Very short stops, short hops between chargers, or trips recorded before the telemetry existed simply show their summary line instead.

The share link shows the map, stats, legs, and charge curves — but never your exact start and end. A 5-mile privacy zone around the trip's endpoints (and your home, if set) is always blanked on public links and cards, no matter what your private settings say. Superchargers stay pinned; they're public places.

The Download card buttons render the trip as an image — the Atlas style matches the share page, the Poster style is a sunset travel-poster take on the same route.

Each trip can carry up to three photos, added from the trip page. They show on the public share page, so every upload is screened by an AI vision model before it's stored — explicit or violent content is rejected on the spot with nothing saved. Big phone shots are downscaled in your browser before upload, and deleting a photo kills its link immediately.

On your private trip page, the “Hide start/end areas here” checkbox controls what you see. Public links are always obfuscated regardless. Trips can be deleted permanently from the trip page, and your whole account (trips, Tesla connection, everything) from Settings.