[andrewstuart2]

    Free trial.
    
    Tesla APIs are temporarily free during this trial period.

Oof.

I wonder if this is one more reason Tesla vehicles have gotten cheaper and cheaper. Elon's probably betting on how much companies would pay for access to APIs and thus user data, and gain income to Tesla on top of simply profit margin on the vehicle itself. Much like he's doing at X. I wouldn't be that surprised to see Tesla data become a major part of X strategy as an "everything app" if he continues that path.

Definitely has me second guessing the trigger I was about to pull on that Model 3 performance that just keeps getting cheaper.

[redox99]

> Elon's probably betting on how much other people would pay for access to APIs and thus user data, and gain income on top of simply profit margin on the vehicle itself.

Tesla doesn't expect end users to use this API. This is meant for fleets (like rental companies).

[saurik]

I feel like you are trying to say that you believe this comment to mean that they might try to sell access to the user data acquired from API usage, but I'm pretty sure the connection "and thus" is equating the APIs with user data, as companies paying for access to these APIs is--similar to having access to Facebook's APIs--giving them access to the user data that is accessible via those APIs.

[redox99]

That's a lot of hypotheticals.

What I'm trying to say is that this is unrelated to regular folks' cars. For this you need to manually authorize access to your car, and then they can do things like unlock the doors[1]. It's meant for rental agencies and such. Not to scrap data of any Tesla owner (like Twitter Firehose)

[1] https://developer.tesla.com/docs/fleet-api#door_unlock

[modeless]

Are you trying to say that Tesla will sell bulk user data to advertisers or insurers or credit bureaus or something? That's not what's happening here at all. Users must explicitly authorize each app using this API individually.

[andrewstuart2]

That's not at all what I'm implying. I do know how oauth2 works, but charging for API access adds another revenue stream for Tesla that in many other business models is just considered part of the ecosystem attractiveness.

[modeless]

I think it's far more likely that this API is intended to encourage fleet deployments of Teslas and value add from third party apps, rather than for the API fees themselves to be a profit center. That seems far fetched, and I have trouble seeing how that could discourage someone from buying a Tesla anyway, since you can simply choose not to use these features like the vast majority of owners today.

There are real costs to Tesla to run this API, likely primarily the cell bandwidth, so it makes sense to pass those costs on to users instead of subsiding them, which would likely lead to inefficient use of the API or even abuse.