2026 / Tesla Fleet API / Demo Mode

Road Reliquary

A Tesla trip relic generator that refuses the dashboard. It takes route, charge, weather, and cabin telemetry and compresses a drive into one artifact: part road diary, part battery elegy, part machine memory.

Opening the relic vault.

The premise

One drive. One object.

A normal car app gives you charts, numbers, and too much of both. Road Reliquary waits until the trip is over, then produces a single relic. It could be a poster, a print, a note to your future self, or a quiet screen you keep for years.

Live integration note

This prototype renders the artifact layer using sample telemetry. A production version would keep Tesla OAuth and Fleet API requests on a secure server, then send only the distilled trip record to this page.

If the API is unavailable, the page falls back to seeded relics so the interface still works offline.

Output artifact

The relic

Reliquary 01

June 25, 2026

The fog kept the world at the shoulder.

312 miles. One charge stop. The cabin held at 68F while the coastline disappeared and returned.

You left before the freeway had chosen its voice. The battery fell in clean deliberate steps. At 06:47 the machine was almost silent, gliding between fog banks as if the road had been erased and redrawn under the wheels.

Battery spent 64%
Silence index 81
Altitude gained 4,200 ft

Tesla gives

A drive, not a feed

The useful Tesla payload is small: timestamps, state changes, charge deltas, climate values, and position. Road Reliquary treats those as raw material, then stops. No endless charts. No compulsive refresh.

The translation

Telemetry becomes narrative

A route segment becomes composition. A charge stop becomes punctuation. The quietest minute becomes the emotional center of the artifact. The machine provides facts; the product decides what deserves memory.

Production architecture

Server first, artifact last

Tesla authentication and live vehicle requests belong behind a server or worker. The front end should receive a sanitized trip summary, a relic palette, and the final text blocks. That keeps tokens out of the browser and keeps the interface calm.

Connect your Tesla

Real setup, less friction

Use this page to generate the exact `.dev.vars` block for local development, then submit a live trip summary to the sync route without dropping to `curl`. Secrets are never stored in the browser. Helper fields like weather and route texture can be remembered locally.

1. Generate your local secret file

Paste the real Tesla access token and vehicle identifier here, then copy the generated block into a root-level `.dev.vars` file. Use your VIN or Tesla vehicle `id_s` for `TESLA_VEHICLE_TAG`.

Fill in the fields above to generate a .dev.vars block.

2. Sync a real drive

Once `.dev.vars` is in place and the site is running via Wrangler, submit the trip-level fields Tesla cannot infer from a single snapshot. The sync route will fetch live `vehicle_data` on the server.

Checking local Tesla setup.

Return to Selected Works