I’ve been using Teslemetry for a while now to track my Tesla’s location and battery level in Home Assistant, and a recent blog post on their website caught my attention: local Bluetooth control.
Up until now, every command Teslemetry sent to my car went through the cloud, up to Teslemetry’s servers, out to Tesla’s API, and back down to the vehicle. It works, but it depends on internet connectivity end to end. Their latest beta of the Home Assistant integration adds local Bluetooth control for your vehicle, sending supported commands like locks, climate, and charging directly to the car over BLE first, and falling back to the cloud automatically whenever a local connection isn’t available.
What makes this especially relevant to my own setup: if your Home Assistant server doesn’t have Bluetooth built in, or your car usually parks out of range of it, Home Assistant’s existing Bluetooth proxy support extends coverage to wherever you need it, using a cheap ESP32 running ESPHome’s Bluetooth proxy firmware. That’s exactly the kind of proxy I just set up on an M5NanoC6, so this is a nice example of how a BLE proxy earns its keep beyond just tracking BLE sensors around the house.
Beyond the reliability angle, local Bluetooth control also helps with high-volume use cases like charging on solar, since it can bypass command credits entirely. For anyone running Teslemetry alongside solar automations, that’s a meaningful upside.
If you’re running Teslemetry with a Tesla, it’s worth reading their full writeup on how they got Bluetooth control production-ready:
