As you may have heard, Tesla is in the process of deprecating their legacy API and requiring third party developers to use their new architecture.

Tesla has set an aggressive timeline of deprecating their legacy API by January 2024. In order to minimize disruption, this will necessitate the following:

  1. Vehicle owners will need to go through our new Tesla specific Connect flow in order for you to retain data access.
  2. If you’re issuing commands, your users will also need to add Smartcar’s virtual key.

The new Connect flow for Tesla owners

Starting December 18, 2023, Tesla owners connecting to your application will go through a new version of Smartcar Connect for customers on our Free, Build and Scale Plan. This will not require any code changes on your end.

Enterprise customers will have the option of going through a new version of Smartcar Connect that uses their own brand on the Tesla Login screen. This will require minor changes documented here, and will be possible starting December 20, 2023. Your Smartcar account manager can walk you through these steps.

1

Launching Connect

2

Authorize with Tesla

3

Grant Screen

For more information on testing out the new flow, please see our developer guide.

For existing vehicles

Vehicle owners that are already connected to your application can use our streamlined reauthentication flow to accomplish this. For more information on using this flow, please see our guide for developers.

1

Launching the Re-auth Flow

2

Authorize with Tesla

3

Successful Reconnect

If your application issues commands

In addition to permissions from their authorization flow, Tesla now requires virtual keys for 3rd-party applications in order to issue commands for the following models:

  • All Cybertrucks, Model 3 and Model Y
  • 2021+ Model S and X

Adding a Virtual Key will need to be done after a vehicle owner goes through Tesla’s authorization flow with Smartcar.

Authorizing their Tesla account and adding the key are separate processes.

Please see our vehicle owner page for details on getting Phone as a Key and the virtual key set up.

Next steps

For detailed instructions on how to get set up for the upgraded integration please see our guide for developers.