How to Create a Tesla Geofence: Automated SMS from your Model 3/S/X
*Update 11/13/2020: Unfortunately, Tesla has started restricting access to their API through most major services including AWS. This decision has broken this tutorial.

Introduction

Your Tesla can do many amazing things from driving itself to updating itself. Let’s add another cool trick — automatically texting someone when you get close.

Here is my motivation for implementing such a feature. Every day I pick up my daughter from swim practice, which means driving through an obnoxious pickup process. She stays inside until I arrive, park, and text her that I am here. Or, she just texts me over and over “are you here yet?” while I am driving. Once she knows I have arrived, she grabs her stuff and walks out to the pickup area, which has a car line I pull up to after giving her a couple of minutes to get outside.

After repeating this 500,000 times, there are some unnecessary steps in this whole process I really want to eliminate for my own sanity. I could make everything so much quicker if I text her that I am almost there while driving and her meet me at the pickup area without parking first. That solution would be unsafe for obvious reasons (don’t text and drive!).

Here is what I want to happen. When I am about 3 minutes away from the pool, my Tesla automatically sends her a text message to get her stuff and meet me at the pickup area. I don’t park but go straight to the front where she is magically waiting for me, ready to get in the car every time.

This tutorial will show you how to create a Tesla geofence to automatically send a SMS text from your Model 3/S/X when you get close to a location. This is particularly useful for daily tasks like picking up the kids from school or practice. It is also another “look at what my Tesla can do that your puny car cannot” feature.

What is a geofence?

A geofence is a virtual perimeter or “fence” around a physical location.
['Jamie Bailey']
['Geofencing', 'Gps', 'Technology', 'Tesla', 'Data']