Tessie — Track your Tesla

Review by eFreeware

If you own a Tesla and want more from it than the factory app offers, Tessie is built for exactly that. The app tracks trips, battery health, charging sessions and phantom drain, and it lets you control the car remotely through a phone, a Wear OS watch or a web browser on a Mac or PC. It is free to download from Google Play, but using it requires a subscription or a one-time payment, so this is not a set-and-forget freebie.

It has been available since June 2020 and sits at a 4.7 average across 6,877 ratings, with more than 100,000 installs. What appeals to me is the breadth — data logging, automation and control in one place rather than three separate tools.

The owner Tessie is built for

This is an app for someone who treats their Tesla as a source of data, not just a car. If you want to know how much range a trip actually cost, how your battery compares with other drivers', or where energy disappears while the car sits parked, Tessie is designed around those questions. The phantom drain tracking in particular speaks to owners who park for long stretches and want to understand what the car is doing when nobody is driving it.

It also suits people who like to automate. Schedules and triggers let the car respond to conditions you set rather than to you remembering to act, and notifications cover driving, charging and Sentry events. That combination is most useful to owners with a regular routine — a daily commute, a home charger, a set of recurring errands — where small automations add up over a year.

The integrations widen the audience further. Someone already running a smart home through Home Assistant or HomeKit can fold the car into the same routines as lights and thermostats, and Alexa users can issue voice commands. If you have been logging data in TezLab, TeslaFi, Teslascope or TeslaMate, you can import that history rather than starting from zero, which matters if you have years of records you do not want to abandon.

Trips, battery and charging records

The core of Tessie is tracking. It records your trips, your battery state and your charging sessions, and it puts your battery figures next to those of other drivers so you can see whether your degradation looks typical. Phantom drain — the range a parked Tesla loses over time — gets its own attention, which is the kind of detail that rarely shows up clearly in a manufacturer's own app.

For anyone who has wondered whether a charging stop was as efficient as it looked, or whether a battery is aging faster than it should, this is the part of the app that earns its keep. The data is presented as yours to view, use, export and delete, which is a sensible stance for information tied to a vehicle and its movements. I would expect the value here to grow with time: a single week of logs is a curiosity, but a year of them answers real questions about cost and battery health.

Automation, alerts and remote control

Beyond logging, Tessie acts on the car. Schedules and triggers automate actions, and notifications keep you informed about driving, charging and Sentry activity. That turns the app from a passive record into something closer to a monitoring service for a vehicle you are not sitting in.

Control reaches beyond the phone. There is a Wear OS app with a tile and complications, so common actions can be reached from a watch face, and a web interface lets you control the car from a browser on a Mac or PC. The developer also describes controlling the car through AI assistants, naming ChatGPT, Claude and Grok, which is an unusual route to remote commands and one I would treat as a convenience rather than the main reason to subscribe.

For owners who want deeper technical insight, the Profiler feature is described as showing real-time OBD-level diagnostics. That is a more specialist tool than trip logging, and it points to an audience comfortable reading vehicle data rather than just glancing at a range figure. Between diagnostics, automation and smart home integrations, the app covers a lot of ground that a stock Tesla setup leaves open.

What Tessie costs

The developer backs the purchase with a money-back guarantee if you are not satisfied, and payment is handled through in-app purchases.

That structure makes sense for a service that stores and processes vehicle data continuously, but it does mean Tessie belongs in the budget alongside charging and insurance rather than in the pile of free utilities. The pricing is worth noting for anyone who dislikes recurring charges, though I cannot say how the options compare in cost or what each includes beyond what the developer states. The practical approach is to use the app on your own driving and charging routine, then decide whether the tracking and automation you actually used justify the price.

How it compares with simpler alternatives

Tesla owners have a few broad routes here. One is the manufacturer's own app, which handles the basics of control and charging without a separate bill. Another is a dedicated logging service focused on trip and battery history, often with a narrower feature set. A third is a smart home platform, which can automate a car alongside everything else in the house but does not specialize in vehicle data.

Tessie's pitch is that it combines those roles: logging, diagnostics, automation, notifications, watch and browser control, and integrations in a single subscription. The trade-off is concentration. Paying one service for all of it is simpler than stitching together several tools, but it also means the whole setup depends on one developer and one payment. For owners who only want to check charge level and lock the doors, that is more than the job requires; for owners who want a record of everything the car does, the combination is the point.

A data companion for committed Tesla owners

Tessie is worth the trial if you want your Tesla's history in one place and you are willing to pay for it. The tracking of trips, battery, charging and phantom drain is the foundation, and automation, alerts, diagnostics and integrations build on top of it. The 4.7 average from 6,877 ratings suggests the approach lands with a good number of the 100,000-plus people who have installed it, though that is a measure of satisfaction rather than a guarantee it fits your habits.

My recommendation is straightforward: install it, run it against your normal driving and charging, and see whether the data and automations change anything you do. If they do, the subscription or one-time payment is easy to justify. If you mainly want to unlock the doors and check the charge, the free manufacturer app already covers that ground, and Tessie's depth will go unused.

What's new in version 16.0.32

Minor bug fixes and improvements.