How it works

How the recording actually works

Worth two minutes, because it explains the thing people ask about most: why a graph sometimes has a hole in it.

The car sends, we don't ask

There's no device in your car and nothing running on your phone. Your Tesla streams its own readings directly to us — position, speed, and gear every ten seconds while you drive, which is the resolution behind the speed, power, and elevation charts, with battery, charging, temperature, and the car's own self-driving odometer alongside them.

That's six times finer than asking on a timer, and it lands in the right place: a car that sends its own position reports every corner it actually turned, where a reading taken once a minute cuts them. On the same drive, streaming tracked the odometer to within a mile over 176.

We never wake your car

Nothing we do touches your car — we don't ask it for anything at all. It talks while it's awake and goes quiet when it sleeps, entirely on its own schedule. Nothing to keep it awake, nothing to drain, and no timer that has to guess when you set off.

It also remembers. Drive through a stretch with no signal and the car holds those readings — roughly 40 minutes of them — until it reconnects, then sends the backlog, so the map fills in a dead zone that used to be a hole.

The one thing you do by hand

For your car to send anything, it needs a virtual key: a one-time approval you give in the Tesla app, on your phone, next to your car. Tesla requires a human in the loop for this — not even Tesla can add it for us. The key lets us send exactly one message: a configuration telling your car where to send data and which certificate to trust. That's the only thing we ever send. It gives us no new permissions — we still can't unlock, start, or drive your car, and adding a key can't change that.

While we're in private beta we walk you through this when you join, rather than leaving you to find it — there's no self-serve pairing screen in the app yet. That one is next.

You can take it back whenever you like: delete the key from your car's Locks screen, or revoke evabouts.app entirely. Your car stops sending at that moment, and recording stops with it — there is no timer to fall back to, because nothing here asks your car for anything.

Where gaps come from

A gap means there was nothing to record, not that something broke — and there is really only one cause left. You parked. The car stops reporting a position when it isn't moving, so every stop leaves a hole. That one is normal and expected.

Two causes that used to be here are gone. No signal no longer costs you anything: the car buffers what it recorded and sends it on reconnect, so a rural interstate fills itself in. Setting off is no longer clipped either — nothing has to notice you left, because the car starts talking the moment it moves.

What a gap looks like

We draw the hole rather than papering over it. Lines on the leg graphs stop and restart instead of running straight across, and the route on the map breaks the same way — because we don't know which road you took, and guessing would look identical to knowing. If real distance passed while we weren't listening, the leg is marked partial data: its distance is short of the truth and its duration isn't meaningful, so we don't show one.

What gaps don't affect

Your headline numbers don't depend on how often we sampled. Total miles come from the odometer, energy and efficiency from the car's own lifetime energy counters — net of regen and counted only while driving, so idle draw during a parked stop doesn't land on your Wh/mi — and charging costs are the amounts Tesla actually billed you. A trip with a patchy route still has an accurate receipt.