Battery
The charge limit Tesla doesn't offer
Tesla can schedule charging based on where you are. It cannot change the limit. iCar can: 80% in your garage, 100% in the work car park, applied the moment you plug in.
With a subscription
The setting that is missing
A lithium battery ages more slowly if it sits around 80%. Everyone knows it, everyone does it, and everyone ends up doing it by hand: you go to 100% the night before a long drive, then forget to come back down for three weeks.
The setting depends on the place, not the day. At home, 80% is plenty for the week. At work, if the charger is there and the drive home is long, 100% makes sense. iCar remembers one limit per place and applies it when the car plugs in there.
No address is ever shared with us
This is the point that decides everything else. Pulling the addresses saved in the Tesla account would have been the obvious way to build this, and the wrong one: we would then hold the home and work address of every subscriber.
The car reports two booleans, "I am at home" and "I am at work". It says it is there without saying where there is. iCar knows nothing more, and needs nothing more.
Three safeguards, because this writes to a real car
Until a limit is entered, iCar touches nothing: the default is to leave the car alone. The limit is applied once per parking, so that someone who corrects it on their Tesla's own screen does not see it put back seconds later. And it is only set on plug-in, never while driving.
The feature also requires the virtual key and telemetry: sending a command to a car needs explicit permission, granted from the Tesla app, vehicle by vehicle.
A charging log, with what each charge cost
Every charge is logged with the energy actually delivered, the charger's name where we know it, and its cost. Cost comes from Tesla's own billing at Superchargers, to the cent. Elsewhere it is estimated from the two rates you enter, one for home and one for public charging.
With no rate entered, no cost is shown. An invented average would look plausible, be wrong, and get copied straight into your accounts.
Range, degradation, and chargers you can actually reach
The battery screen shows current range and degradation, measured against the best reading ever recorded on your car rather than a catalogue figure.
The Supercharger map does not show the nearest ones but the ones within what you have left: the radius comes from your current range. A Supercharger on screen is a Supercharger you can reach.
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