Tesla vanity license plates - clever ideas for a custom plate

May 29, 2022

By Kieran Burgess

@smarlo35

When we get a new car we love to add those little touches that make it our own. Tesla owners are no different, except you’ll probably find a higher percentage of serious ride-pimpers amongst Tesla owners than other car brands.

And there are so many options. Want to organize the vast central console space more efficiently? Need to protect the boot carpets from your wet skis? Even upgraded hard drives for Sentry Mode and in-car refrigerators are available.

But all these perks and polishes are best appreciated by you, inside the car. What about projecting your personality to those around you? A custom wrap or a paint job is nice, but there’s another way. License plates.

What better way to let your sense of humor show, give a gentle ribbing to the gas guzzlers following you, or make a serious point about why you went green. Let’s take a look at some of the options you might want to consider for a custom plate.

Many countries allow you to purchase a license plate with your own choice of letters and numbers. Sure, you could go for your name or something that means something to you alone.

But why not lean into the Tesla vibe with your plate, and make a statement! Here are five genuine plates already out there.

LOL OIL

While quite a nice sentiment at the best of times, the recent skyrocketing of oil and gas prices has probably made this Tesla owner more ROFL OIL than a mere LOL.

3VOLVED

@Lucybri83

This Model 3 owner shared her new plate on Twitter, and admitted that she reserved this plate 2.5 years before getting hold of the car itself. That’s dedication to the cause: in this case throwing out a cleverly ambiguous statement that could be taken as an observation on Teslas, EVs, or EV owners’ level of evolution. Nice twist on replacing the E with a 3, a la Model 3.

THX 3LON

@sampagnepapi_

Continuing the ‘Tesla E’ theme of throwing in the number 3 instead, this owner knows who is responsible for this slice of happiness. I wonder if it’s appreciation for the vision and achievements of Elon Musk and his team, or whether the car was a personal gift from Elon?! Probably not the latter.

BUY TSLA

@sampagnepapi_

You don’t need to be a certified financial advisor to offer this advice. This Model X owner is clearly playing the long game, in more ways than one. Looking at the healthy level of dirt on the bodywork, this license plate is a commitment to the stock market strategy of going long on Tesla, and the owner doesn’t look like they’ll be changing their advice any time soon.

NOPLANETB

@smarlo35

Straight to the point, if you’d rather not beat around the bush with the environmental message through gentle humor, lest the message be lost, you could take a leaf out of this Australian owner’s book.

Unfortunately, some folk can’t get a vanity plate and are forced to go with a regular random assigned plate. Where I am in Switzerland, you can choose your number from a catalog, and it looks like that’s the case for @thevoltmonkey in Germany too:

Quite an inventive way of proclaiming this Tesla as not just any old Tesla, but ‘Dah Tesla’.

So maybe you can see if one of these options are available in your area, or perhaps you can think along some other pun lines. Model Y owners can have some fun with Y OH Y, Y BE MAD, or YNOT. Or any Tesla owner could consider an electricity pun, for example, OHM RUN, PLUG IN or SAY WATT.

There’ll be some limits, depending on where you are. There’s usually a minimum and maximum number of characters allowed. Often, nothing that can appear obscene or offensive will be allowed, and there are stories of people in Canada and some US states retrospectively being ordered to give up their plates due to bad language or perceived discrimination against an ethnic minority group. In the UK, you can’t have a Q at the start of your number (they are reserved for kit cars) or display a number that could appear to show the car as younger than it really is, as standard plates include the year of registration - so including ‘22’ on a car manufactured in 2020, for example.

Of course, whether or not you’ve got the perfect plate, there’s nothing stopping you from making a little nod to your likes and wants through the plate holder…

Now, when the full self-driving revolution is complete, will there still be a need for license plates anyway? If there are no more driving infractions, and the Robotaxi fleet means the end of parking fines, do the authorities need the plates anymore? Or will every car be identifiable through a unique identifier broadcast by the computer?

In the meantime, make the most of those customized plates.

Tesla Continues to Crack Down on Leaks

September 4, 2024

By Karan Singh

Not a Tesla App

Tesla continues to crack down on leaks, even after making changes to its internal builds. Internal testers and employees previously leaked new software updates with impunity, but it recently got a little harder, with Tesla watermarking release notes with the vehicle’s VIN.'

Discord user

Tesla has recently taken this a few steps further than just watermarking the release notes in the vehicle and in the Tesla app.

API Changes

Tesla has an internal early access program (Wave 1), which allows employees access to the newest updates before they’re made available to the public. This allows employees to experience the latest features on their personal vehicles and help provide feedback to Tesla. It’s a nice perk for employees and gives Tesla one last chance to test software before it’s rolled out more widely.

Previously, if these vehicles were enrolled in the Wave 1 program and a third-party service, the service could use Tesla’s APIs to leak the latest release notes. This used to be a convenient and simple way for outside organizations to get their hands on release notes early, but Tesla has now made changes to prevent this.

Now, vehicles enrolled in the employee early access program won’t return release notes through the API anymore.

Who Gets These Early Updates?

Tesla issues these early updates to its internal ADAS testers, as well as Wave 1 employees. Any Tesla employee can sign up for their early-access program. The tester vehicles are tightly controlled, and there usually aren’t any leaks at this level, other than sightings of unique test beds like the Cybertruck with LIDAR.

Wave 1 employees come after the internal testers and serve as an additional step before public release to early-access customers, such as Tesla influencers.

Most Tesla releases follow this release process: QA > Wave 1 > Influencers > Customers

Wave 1 employees serve as a barrier between customers and a buggy update. Since Tesla needs to test hundreds if not thousands of hardware variations, due to different manufacturers for certain parts, this group plays a critical role in letting Tesla test a wider fleet that is still private.

Tesla doesn’t allow customers to roll back vehicle software, but it is doable through Tesla’s internal service tools on an as-needed basis. This lets Tesla find and kill bugs before they grow into a rampaging problem when released to hundreds of thousands of Tesla vehicles worldwide.

Tesla Now Charges By Partial kWh at Superchargers

September 4, 2024

By Karan Singh

Not a Tesla App

As of approximately early August 2024, Tesla has now begun to charge for Supercharging by the partial kWh, rather than by rounding down to the nearest kWh. So far, this change appears to be applicable throughout North America and Europe.

We speculated that Tesla may start doing this when the Tesla app was updated to v4.34.1. Previously, Tesla only displayed whole numbers for kWh charged. With this app update, Tesla started showing four decimal places, however, until recently the decimals were always zero.

As of now Tesla now rounds charging to four decimal places (the ten-thousandth place) for the energy provided.

Not a Tesla App

Partial Charges

This means that your Supercharging bills will be more accurate and possibly more expensive, but also nets Tesla a few additional cents on the transaction.

For example, if you previously Supercharged 30.3245 kWh in July at $0.50 per kWh, you’d have been billed exactly $15 since the energy used would have been rounded to 30 kWh. However, with these changes, you would now be billed for the exact kWh used, so your bill would be $15.16 (rounded down to the nearest cent).

This isn’t a hugely impactful change for most of us who use Superchargers occasionally, but for Tesla as a whole, these partial charges likely add up to thousands of dollars of revenue every day.

Superchargers are expensive to plan, permit, produce, install, and commission, so each additional cent helps justify Tesla’s expansion of its Supercharging network. In fact, Tesla just bought a parking lot in NYC to presumably build a new Supercharger for $18 million. Additionally, this change helps Tesla to be more accurate in accounting for electricity delivered to vehicles.

Supercharger Expansion

Even after the big shakeup of the Supercharger team, Tesla has committed itself to expanding its network in North America, with new locations still being planned and prepared, and some new ones being commissioned between then and today.

Tesla has set out to expand and continue its Supercharger program, so we can get behind the Supercharger team eking out the last few drops of revenue to keep the expansion going. Hopefully, some of the new locations are in relatively remote locations to help close of the charging gaps.