Local control lands in Home Assistant 2026.10

Home Assistant 2026.10 is out, and it's a big one for Teslemetry. By my count there are 64 Teslemetry pull requests in this release, and two of them are the features I've been most excited about all year: Bluetooth vehicle control and local Powerwall control are now part of the core integration. No HACS, no beta channel, just update Home Assistant and pair.

Bluetooth vehicle control, now in core

Back in July I announced Bluetooth vehicle control in the HACS beta. Since then it's been running in a lot of garages, picked up a few fixes along the way, been through review by the Home Assistant maintainers, and as of 2026.10 it ships with every Home Assistant install.

Once a vehicle is paired, commands like locks, climate, charging, seat heaters and the frunk go to the car over Bluetooth first, and fall back to the cloud automatically, per command, whenever the car is out of range. Commands sent over Bluetooth never touch Teslemetry's or Tesla's servers, so they don't consume command credits, and they keep working when your internet or Tesla's API doesn't. If your car parks out of range of your Home Assistant server, a cheap ESP32 running ESPHome's Bluetooth proxy in the garage solves that.

For now Bluetooth is only used for commands. Entity state still comes from Fleet Telemetry streaming, which already arrives in real time. If you want to check whether a command went over Bluetooth or through Teslemetry, open your credit history. If it isn't there, it went over Bluetooth.

Local Powerwall control

When Tesla blocked Teslemetry earlier this year, I said I would invest in local control for the Powerwall to reduce our reliance on Tesla's energy backend (Powergate). Now it's here.

If your energy site has a Powerwall 2 or Powerwall 3, Home Assistant can now pair with it over your local network and send energy commands, like changing the operation mode or backup reserve, directly to the gateway. It's noticeably faster than the round trip through the cloud, and if the gateway can't be reached the command falls back to the cloud automatically. Local data polling is next, which will bring higher refresh rates and extra data like individual solar strings.

Turning it on

Both features are opt-in and set up from the Teslemetry integration under Settings > Devices & services.

• Bluetooth: select Add local vehicle, choose your vehicle, and approve Home Assistant's virtual key by tapping your key card on the centre console when asked. You need a Bluetooth adapter or Bluetooth proxy in range of the car.
• Powerwall: select Add local energy site, choose your site, flick the On/Off switch on your primary Powerwall off and back on to approve access, then confirm the gateway's address and enter the last 5 characters of its Wi-Fi password from the label behind the front cover (or the Backup Gateway door on Powerwall 2).

You only need to do this once per vehicle or site. The full walkthrough is in the Home Assistant documentation.

Everything else in 2026.10

Local control gets the headline, but most of the 64 pull requests are fixes and polish that every Teslemetry user gets, whether you pair anything or not:

• Streamed energy history. Energy history totals now arrive over the stream instead of Home Assistant polling and summing them every minute (#182529)
• Accurate climate state. Streaming vehicles now take their climate state from HvacPower, so the climate entity reflects whether the HVAC is actually running (#183718)
• Right-hand drive. The target temperature on right-hand drive streaming vehicles now follows the driver's side (#183421)
• Cabin overheat protection shows the right temperature on streaming vehicles and in Fahrenheit (#183420, #183730)
• Cybertruck owners on streaming finally get their tonneau cover (#183430)
• Fewer unknowns after a restart. Binary sensors and the windows cover no longer restore into the wrong state (#183451, #183468), and the media player behaves itself while driving (#183452)
• Tariff calendars use your energy site's timezone and no longer drop periods ending on a Monday (#183456, #183465)
• More resilient setup. A connection error during startup now retries instead of failing, and connection errors on commands show a readable message (#183449, #183457)
• Safer diagnostics. Serial numbers and tokens are redacted from downloaded diagnostics (#183471)

Before you upgrade

A handful of entities that never worked properly have been removed: the legacy Powerwall energy sensors, the passenger seat belt sensor, location entities on accounts without the vehicle_location scope, and the battery level sensor on sites without a battery. Streaming vehicles also no longer get polling-only entities, because updating them was quietly spending command credits, which surprised more than a few people (#181351). If any of these show up as orphaned after upgrading, you can safely delete them.

The energy history sensors also changed how they report totals, so expect a one-off step of up to a day's worth of energy in your long-term statistics after the upgrade.

How it got built and tested

Getting 64 pull requests into one Home Assistant release is as much about process as it is about code. Every one of them is reviewed by the Home Assistant core team, whose review time is limited, so I spent a lot of this cycle making sure every PR that reached them was worth it.

Both features spent months in the HACS beta before going anywhere near core. I covered the Bluetooth side of that, including sitting next to the car testing every physical command by hand, in How we got it reliable. Local Powerwall control got the same treatment on my own Powerwall 3, and the beta put it in front of real users on networks and gateways I don't have.

Home Assistant limits each contributor to 10 open pull requests at a time, so everything had to be queued and drip-fed a few at a time. I ordered the queue by impact on customers, so fixes for real problems went first and cosmetic changes went last.

The big ones took time, and I think that's a good thing. The Bluetooth pull request (#176296) went through several rounds of review over a week with @erwindouna, and it's a better integration for every one of them. Local Powerwall control (#176969) was reviewed and merged by @silamon.

The last two days before the 2026.10 beta was cut saw 24 Teslemetry pull requests merged. The day the beta came out I installed it against my own account, car and Powerwall and ran it through the full Tesla integration test suites, and then a week of public beta gave everyone one last chance to catch anything that slipped through before it reached you.

Thank you

A huge thank you to the Home Assistant maintainers who reviewed and merged this release's pull requests: @silamon, @zweckj, @MartinHjelmare, @erwindouna, @joostlek, @epenet, @Markus98, @frenck, @TheJulianJES and @edenhaus. And to everyone running the HACS beta and reporting what broke, local control would not be in core today without you.

So go update Home Assistant, pair your car and your Powerwall, and let me know how it goes on Discord. If you still want the newest features before they reach core, the HACS beta isn't going anywhere.