GuestLot vs Tessie
Tessie (tessie.com) is excellent owner and fleet telematics for Teslas — drive and charge history, battery health, automations, more than 500,000 users, and a fleet Guest Mode that hands out access by QR code. It is priced per car and built for a permanent relationship with a vehicle you own.
GuestLot is the shop side of a temporary relationship with a car you do not own: three days of custody, no owner account, and a receipt at the end. If you are an owner who wants analytics, use Tessie. If you are a shop holding customers’ Teslas, that is a different product.
What Tessie does well
Depth on the vehicle you own. Tessie has spent years building the richest owner-side view of a Tesla available from a third party, and half a million users is not an accident. Its fleet tier extends the same model to operators with several cars, including sharing access by QR code — which is a legitimately elegant answer to “let this person drive my car today.”
- Drive, charge, and battery-health history with real analytical depth.
- Automations and integrations for owners who want their car wired into everything else.
- 500,000+ users, which means the edge cases have been found already.
- A fleet tier with Guest Mode by QR — sensible for operators sharing vehicles they own.
- A permanent owner relationship: your car, your account, your history, indefinitely.
Why a shop cannot just buy Tessie
Not because it lacks features. Because the shape is wrong. Every assumption in owner telematics — permanent account, per-car pricing, indefinite history, one person who owns both the car and the login — inverts when the vehicle belongs to a customer who is getting it back on Thursday.
- A shop cannot ask each customer to create an account with a vendor to authorize a visit.
- Per-car pricing does not survive throughput. Forty cars a month is forty new vehicles.
- Indefinite history is a liability, not a feature, when the car is someone else’s.
- Guest Mode by QR shares a car you own. Custody is the reverse: the owner grants, the shop receives, and the grant must expire.
- The owner is entitled to a copy of the record at the end. That is a custody obligation, not a telematics feature.
Side by side
- Tessie compared with GuestLot
Built for
Owners and fleet operators — cars you own
Shops — cars you are holding for a customer
Who holds the account
The vehicle owner
The shop; owners never need an account
Pricing shape
Per vehicle
Per location, flat — $179 or $349 per month
Time horizon
Permanent, with long history
One visit; access auto-revokes at hand-back
Access sharing
Fleet Guest Mode by QR, for cars you own
Owner authorizes the shop through Tesla's own flow
Output
Dashboards and analytics for the owner
AccessReceipt to the owner, tokenized, at pickup
Liability framing
Not the product's job
Bailment, garage keepers, intake evidence
They coexist fine
A Tesla can stream Fleet Telemetry to five third-party applications at once, so an owner who runs Tessie does not have to disconnect anything to authorize a shop for a visit — and should not be asked to. In practice, an owner with Tessie is the easiest customer a shop can get: they already understand scopes, they already check their car’s history, and they will notice a shop that documents the visit properly.
The mechanics of that concurrency are in the Fleet API guide.
Choosing
- You own the Tesla and want to know everything about it: Tessie.
- You run a shop and hold other people's Teslas for days at a time: GuestLot.
- You are an owner about to drop a car off: you want both — your own history, and a shop that hands you a receipt.