[modeless]

Almost all of this functionality has been available for many years through the reverse engineered API used by the official Tesla app. There is unofficial third party documentation and many third party apps using it are available.

The difference here is that Tesla is creating a new, officially supported API explicitly for third parties, with official documentation, scoped authentication, and a developer program that requires registration (and in the future, payment). Presumably once the SDK is finalized they will start cracking down on apps using the older reverse engineered API.

The only new functionality AFAIK is a push API that allows cars to directly stream information to your server via their cellular connection; previously the information was available but required polling through Tesla's intermediary servers.