Gotcha - I guess I’m still not following though. Twitter and Reddit upped API fees because the data could be used to train LLMs.
Obviously if you had access to everyone’s driving/Tesla data - that’d be valuable - but I am assuming the API data is only for the owners using these the apps like you mentioned.
Is the data available across all users or are they prepping to release some kind of anonymized user data?
Most of these apps run via the app providers servers. So while each subscriber provides an apikey that only gets data on their car(s), the app provider can save every single api response and whatever they want with it.
Other than that, a $1 notepad and a pencil will do usage tracking just fine for years. You can't take a trip unless you're already sitting in the car where you can see and write down the info.
I've decided that we were just fine without the internet, please send your comment to me via written correspondence, since you have your notepad ready anyway.
The internet allows us to communicate quickly over distances we couldn't otherwise without a long time between messages. What does this app do that I can't do cheaper and easier with pencil and paper?
I'm not opposed to technology, but I'm not paying for it if there's no benefit.
But it does it both easier and better than pen/paper because it does it automatically without them needing to even think about it. And it's already available electronically so they can graph it and run statistics on their usage and trips...you know, actually use the data for something purposeful.
With pen/paper they just have a sheet they can't do anything with. They now have to manually enter all this data to use it for anything, which is a lot on unnecessary manual effort.
If you want all the metrics that it logs automatically, you're going to be spending 20min every time you drive anywhere logging everything manually. And then you're still not getting the continuous logging during drives. Plus you still need to do all the data processing yourself on top of that.
You can do basically everything you can do from teslas own app, but automated and even a little more. For example I use it to automatically control charging power to match the surplus of my solar panels, that keeps my grid-use for my car to 0kWh for roughly 5 months of the year. And I can set the charging power lower than I can in the Tesla app (app is 5A minimum, API goes to 0A), which is convenient for the solar charging.
And of course you can pull battery data, odometer etc. with it as well.