Charge HQ controls charging on Tesla vehicles by communicating directly with the vehicle (not the wall charger). There are two steps to enable this communication.

Step 1: Third Party App access grant

Tesla allows apps like Charge HQ to communicate with their vehicles via an official Third Party App access mechanism.

Access is enabled by logging in to your Tesla account, and granting access to Charge HQ. This happens at a Tesla user account level.

When you grant access, Charge HQ gains visibility of any Vehicles, Powerwalls, or Tesla solar systems connected to your Tesla user account.

The access grant mechanism includes granular control over what information we can see and what we can control.

All information collection and charging control happens via this access grant. If you have multiple Tesla accounts (E.g. multiple drivers, each with their own login):

• Charge HQ will only interact via the Tesla user account that is used to grant Third Party App access.
• This will be the same Tesla user account that you use when configuring Charge HQ.
• You do not need to enable access on multiple Tesla user accounts.
• If you have multiple Tesla products (Vehicle, Home Battery, Tesla Solar) access should be granted via a Tesla user account which has access to all of these products.

The Third Party App access grant mechanism creates a secure token which is used by Charge HQ to authenticate with your Tesla account (via a standard oauth access grant). We never have access to your Tesla user account email or password.

Access Scopes

When you enable Third Party App access, you will be asked to select what Charge HQ should have access to. Access permissions are grouped together into scopes, Tesla controls which permissions are in each scope. In each scope, there is information we don't need access to alongside information that we do.

For example, we don't need to know about "eligible upgrades" or "service scheduling data" but these permissions are in the same scope as "location" which we need to ensure we only control charging when your vehicle is at home.

The access scopes are:

Profile Information: Allow access to your profile information, including data such as your contact information, profile picture, and referral information

• Not required.

Vehicle Information: Allow access to your vehicle information, including data such as your vehicle's live data, location, eligible upgrades, nearby superchargers, ownership, and service scheduling data

• Required to ensure we only control charging at your home location and optimise vehicle polling.
• Required to access to Powerwall / Tesla Solar data. This may change in future.

Vehicle Commands: Allow access to your vehicle commands, including commands such as add/remove driver, access Live Camera, unlock, wake up, remote start, and schedule software updates

• Not required.

Vehicle Charging Management: Allow access to your vehicle charging management, including data such as your vehicle charging history, billed amount, charging location, commands to schedule, and start/stop charging

• Required to manage charging

Energy Product Information: Allow access to your energy product information for Powerwall and solar, including data such as energy flow history, saving forecast, tariff rates, grid import, calendar, site status, time of use, and ownership

• Required to collect information about solar production

Energy Product Commands: Allow access to your energy product commands for Powerwall and solar, including commands such as updates to storm mode and off-grid charging reserve

• Requested to support future features that improve the interaction between home battery and EV charging

Notes:

• The Tesla Third Party App access mechanism is still under active development. Currently, even if you only have a Tesla Energy Product (no vehicle), the Vehicle Information scope is required to collect the data about your Powerwall or Tesla Solar.
• When granting access, if the wrong scopes are selected, you can reset them by removing and then re-enabling third party access.
• Third party app access can be revoked at any time via the Tesla portal.

Step 2: Pairing

This step is not required for pre-2021 Model S / X vehicles.

The Third Party App access grant gives Charge HQ the ability to communicate with Tesla on your behalf, with access to the vehicles and energy products linked to your account.

In order for your vehicle to accept commands from Charge HQ, you must install a virtual key onto your vehicle via a pairing process. This key is used to securely verify that the commands are coming from Charge HQ.

This step can only be completed by the vehicle owner. In addition, the vehicle owner must have completed step 1 to allow Charge HQ access to their account.

Charge HQ hosts a public key at http://tesla.chargehq.net. This address is registered with Tesla as part of our Third Party App. When each vehicle is paired, the virtual key (being a public key) is downloaded from this address onto the vehicle itself.

Once Charge HQ's virtual key is installed on a given vehicle, any user with access to the vehicle that has completed Step 1 (Third Party App access grant) will be able to use Charge HQ with it.

The virtual key will remain on the vehicle until it is removed. This can be done via using the vehicle's touchscreen. As an owner, if you wish to prevent an authorised driver from using Charge HQ with the vehicle, you need to remove the Charge HQ virtual key.