Meet TezLab, The Fitbit For Tesla Vehicles
Some of the best real-time insights into Tesla and its global fleet of electric vehicles 鈥?outside the confines of its Silicon Valley headquarters 鈥?might be through the lens of TezLab, a tiny upstart in Brooklyn. Now, a little more than two years after its founding, TezLab is on the verge of hitting what its founders believe is a tipping point of users, a milestone that could finally trigger a path to monetization. And it鈥檚 adding lots of new features to help accelerate that plan. For the non-Tesla owner, the name TezLab is likely a foreign one. In certain circles though, namely Tesla owners obsessed with understanding how their electric vehicle performs, TezLab is a familiar friend. Tezlab is a free app that鈥檚 like a Fitbit for a Tesla vehicle. Tesla owners who download the app can track their efficiency, total trip miles and use it to control certain functions of the vehicle, such as locking and unlocking the doors and heating and air conditioning. There鈥檚 even a gamification piece that lets users earn badges for hitting milestones or completing tasks.
The company has started to add new features as part of a longer term plan aimed at monetization. One of these features, which crowdsources data like Waze to give insights and ratings on Tesla Supercharger stations, is rolling out now. The video below shows how this supercharger feature will function. The Waze for supercharger feature is considered 鈥減hase one鈥?of the company鈥檚 plans to broaden its crowdsourcing and social community. HFC鈥檚 engineers, including co-founders Ben Schippers and William Schenk, were attracted to Tesla largely because of its techcentric approach and one important detail: the Tesla API endpoints are accessible to outsiders. The Tesla API is technically private. But it exists, allowing Tesla鈥檚 own first-party app to communicate with the cars to do things like read battery charge status and lock doors. When reverse-engineered, it鈥檚 possible for a third-party app to communicate directly with the API. 鈥淓ssentially, the plumbing is already built to connect to the server,鈥?Schippers told TechCrunch recently.
A Tesla vehicle buying trend was triggered at HFC. 350,000 to build the first version of TezLab. TezLab hasn鈥檛 captured anywhere near every Tesla owner. But Schippers believes they鈥檙e getting close to reaching a critical mass of users. More than 200 owners are downloading the app each week, and that rate is accelerating, he said. TezLab has 16,000 total installs on the Apple App Store and Google Play, according to Sensor Tower . The figures are all unique, new installs. The firm doesn鈥檛 count re-installs or downloads to multiple devices belonging to the same user. However, that total install number is likely closer to 18,000 because many are listed under TestFlight, an online service used to test apps. In comparison, Tesla delivered 245,506 vehicles globally in 2018. TezLab doesn鈥檛 expect every Tesla owner to download the app. Instead, Schippers is initially aiming for 10% of owners 鈥?a target he believes is within reach 鈥?and eventually higher. Even at its current numbers, TezLab has become a massive repository of Tesla data. The company is storing between 850,000 to 1 million events a day, and that volume is growing.
That translates to more than 1 GB of data a day, according to Schippers. 鈥淲e now have enough data in our system to start making large assumptions of what the fleet is doing and why,鈥?said Schippers, who is CEO of HappyFunCorp and head of product at TezLab. The data is aggregated and anonymous and isn鈥檛 shared publicly. And there are no plans to sell that data. 鈥淚 think we can create something really meaningful, without getting into the business of selling data,鈥?Schippers told TechCrunch. Of course, what Schippers and others at TezLab have built could, theoretically, end overnight if Tesla were to change access. Tesla could do to us what Facebook did to Zynga, and we don鈥檛 want that,鈥?Schippers said. Tesla declined to comment on this topic. What TezLab does provide publicly on its website are insights based on that crunched data. For instance, anyone visiting the site can get a breakdown of model ownership, the average trip length and average time between plugging in.