The Road Away From Vehicle Polling

When Tesla announced the Fleet Telemetry pricing, their intention was clearly to disincentivize the use of the vehicle_data endpoint, as the cost Tesla placed on it was astronomically more expensive than the Fleet Telemetry alternative. The artificial inflation of this price was further reinforced when Tesla announced that legacy vehicles that do not support Fleet Telemetry would have a 90% discount on the exact same API call.

Since this announcement the goal has been to reduce vehicle_data calls as much as possible. At the start of February polling was reduced from 1 minute to a 10 minute minimum interval, rather than 15 minutes as originally planned. This was successful in bringing Fleet API costs down significantly, but the average vehicle is still using USD$3 of vehicle_data calls per month. On a USD$2.50 vehicle subscription, you can see how this is a problem.

Two fifty?

The vehicle data subscription price was determined weeks before Tesla's announcement, to try and avoid any price changes after we launched the partnership with Tint.ai. It was based entirely on information that turned out to be incorrect, however it did cover 1000 vehicle_data calls which I believe was just enough to meet the needs of most users during the transition period. So when it came time to introduce Command Credits, $2.50 covered 2000 commands which felt right.

• Do I like that every product on Teslemetry starts at $2.50? Yes.
• Does that make things more confusing for customers? Yes.
• Is the price going to change anytime soon? No.

So the goal is to make things more efficient instead of raising prices.

The route

Recently the website was updated to require the Virtual Key be installed on all modern vehicles with a vehicle subscription.

Before the end of March, an email will be going out to all customers who have a modern vehicle without the virtual key installed, informing them of the changes and timeline below, and encouraging the installation of the virtual key as soon as possible. Tint.ai customers will be encouraged to use the Tint.ai partner page to check their virtual key status and configure their vehicles.

On April 1st, automatic vehicle data polling is going to increase to 15 minutes (from 10) for modern vehicles, and 90 seconds (from 60) for legacy vehicles. Home Assistant 2025.4 should negate the need for vehicle_data polling almost entirely, so this change should go mostly unnoticed.

On July 1st, modern vehicles will have their automatic vehicle data polling disabled, cached data deleted, and the vehicle_data endpoint will be charged at 2 command credits per call. There are no planned changes for legacy vehicles, however this may change based on developments from Tesla, as they have stated they are working on Fleet Telemetry for legacy vehicles.

The Destination

For the majority of people, this change will be invisible, as the Home Assistant integration will be updated to provide an even better experience without the need for polling vehicle data. However if you have built custom solutions on top of Teslemetry, you should start migrating off the vehicle_data endpoint now, and move to streaming data.

I will be proactively contacting the third party developers I am aware of, however I expect this transition may not be possible for all applications.