Driving A Tesla & Interacting with the “Internet of Things”

In an emergency I had the opportunity to drive  a new Tesla from Vancouver to the California border for a friend. It was a chance to understand a bit more about the Internet of Things (IOT) and also learn more about the private community club of Tesla. While you can read many articles about how the vehicles brake and about the internal features and innovations, there’s not that much written about the interconnected linkages Tesla has created at their “refuelling” stations, or the data they are collected from Tesla drivers.

First the stuff every Tesla driver will tell you~it cost $3.00 to drive from Vancouver to the California border return, and that is the cost of connecting at Tesla’s charging system. The Tesla Supercharger network cannot be used by other electric cars, although Tesla does provide an adapter so their vehicles can use other Level Two AC chargers.

The Tesla Supercharger installations look like an army of gas pumps  strategically located so you don’t feel silly or out of place charging a Tesla up at 4:00 a.m. in the morning. The network across North America of these charging stations is a key investment in selling the vehicles for long distance.

You can see a map of the 14,000 charging stations across North America here.Supposedly you can charge a car completely at a supercharger in 30 minutes. My experience was it normally took a bit longer than that.

The locations of the super chargers are near shopping malls and well-lit suburban hotels, with 24 hour operating restaurants close by.  People driving Teslas into the charging stations all seem to emerge with their own ipads in hand looking thoughtful. If you overstay at a charging station, you are curtly reminded of your transgression by notification from Tesla, and then fined. There’s also a culture in place to ensure you move your vehicle out of the charging station promptly, even if the entire place is vacant.

But back to the Internet of Things~during the recent hurricane in Florida, Tesla by software update allowed owners  in those areas impacted to drive longer distances for a certain period of time.

There’s a lot of data that Tesla is picking up from their drivers too-where people travel, how long they stay, and how long they are spending in communities next to the charging stations.

As Bernard Marr & Co write, that data is addition to the crowdsourced data from all of its vehicles “with internal as well as external sensors which can pick up information about a driver’s hand placement on the instruments and how they are operating them. As well as helping Tesla to refine its systems, this data holds tremendous value in its own right. Researchers at McKinsey and Co estimate that the market for vehicle-gathered data will be worth $750 billion a year by 2030.”

And here’s a short YouTube video on the connectivity of The Internet of Things and autonomous vehicles that has just been released. Using a cell phone you can leave your car, have it park itself, and then call it back from its parking space when you are ready to leave.