Tesla for Business
- Role
- Design Lead2020–2023
- Team
- Hands-on lead with 3 PMs and 12 engineers. Managed 2 designers in 2022–23.
- Outcome
- Sales grew 150% year over year. Reduced fleets’ data costs 94% with streaming telemetry. When I left, it ran more than 150,000 vehicles and 2,000 Wall Connectors in 27 countries.
I took Tesla for Business from the first sketches to launch and the years after: how companies buy, take delivery of and run their Tesla fleets. If you rode in a Tesla on Uber, rented one from Hertz or charged at a resort, that fleet ran on it.
The bet
Fleet management companies were buying Teslas by email and phone, one order at a time. After research with customers in the US and the Netherlands, I bet on one self-serve platform for the people who keep fleets moving, from the logistics lead receiving hundreds of cars to the driver who just needs one that’s ready. Onboarding went from six weeks to 15 minutes, and handing over a car from two weeks to two minutes.
The hardest part was the bar. Tesla expects speed and precision at once, and the job was to clear that bar every time.
Tesla Semi
I extended Tesla for Business to Semi: each truck’s details, charge and the drivers who share it. I was there in December 2022 when PepsiCo took the first ones.
A hundred thousand cars for Hertz
Tesla books revenue at delivery, so when Hertz ordered 100,000 Teslas in October 2021, the largest electric vehicle order anyone had placed, every hour counted. Accepting cars one at a time could not keep up, so I designed bulk delivery: a logistics team accepts hundreds of vehicles in one click. For every other fleet, I replaced three to five weeks of documents with one cart and a short checklist, and sales volume grew 150% year over year.
“It's a super intuitive system.”
Service
Service was costing Tesla sales: fleets had no alerts, costs or scheduling. I brought service into Tesla for Business, with repair estimates approved in bulk, and approvals went from 68% to 84%.
Charging
Fleets charge at Superchargers and at 2,000 Wall Connectors of their own. I designed the charging dashboard that puts every session in one history, with tools to share chargers and get paid.
Fleet API
I led product strategy for Tesla's Fleet API, so companies could plug Tesla for Business into their own software. They read each car's status, send it commands, stream live telemetry to their own servers, and pull charging and energy data. Streaming gave fleets a 94% cost reduction: in Tesla’s developer docs, a large fleet’s 70 signals cost about $0.0067 an hour per car, against $0.12 for asking each car for its data.
Beyond cars
Tesla for Business grew past cars. Businesses now buy whole Supercharger sites and run them from one portal, built on the charging dashboard I designed. Robotaxi and Optimus bring fleets with no driver at all: hundreds of cars and robots to order, deliver, charge and service. It’s the same problem we started on with cars, at a larger scale.