what is pulsecheck

The shield you'll see on verified listings. Here's exactly what it means.

Every used-car listing anywhere is, fundamentally, a stranger's claims typed into a form. The mileage, the options, the battery health - all of it is whatever the seller wrote down. Usually that's honest. Sometimes it isn't, and you have no way to tell which from the outside.

PulseCheck replaces the claims with data from the car. The owner connects their Tesla account, we read that one vehicle once, and what the car says goes on the listing.

See a sample report → - rendered by the same code that runs on a live listing, with example data.

What it actually proves

The strongest signal isn't any single number - it's the connection itself. Tesla only returns the vehicles on that person's account, so a matching VIN proves the seller controls the account the car is registered to.

That is a better answer to "is this listing real?" than an ID check. Identity tells you who someone is. This tells you they have the car.

VIN - confirmed against Tesla's records, not just decoded.
Odometer - read from the car on the date shown.
Factory options - paint, wheels, interior, seating, and Autopilot hardware, as the car was built.
Paid Full Self-Driving - the single most misrepresented item on a used Tesla listing, and an $8,000 difference in what you're buying.
Free Supercharging - the transferable kind (option code SC01), which is rarer than listings claim. Most cars advertised with "free charging" actually have pay-as-you-go access. See the Supercharging guide.
Battery health - Tesla's own reported figure, for the cars that have one. More on that below.

How to read the battery number

This is the part worth understanding properly, because it's the number people quote at each other without knowing where it comes from.

There are two ways the number can arrive, and the report tells you which one you are looking at.

The figure comes from the car, or it isn't shown. Tesla holds a state-of-health measurement for most cars - the percentage, the date the vehicle reported it, and the usable pack capacity in kWh. That is what the report shows, and there is no caveat about charge level, because it isn't derived from one.

Where Tesla has no figure, the report simply leaves battery health out. We don't substitute a number of our own. It isn't about age - we have seen two cars of the same year and model where one reports a figure and the other doesn't. It tracks the car's software: Tesla began reporting battery health in a later release, so a car left on an older build has nothing on file. Updating the car and re-running PulseCheck should produce a measured figure.

An absent battery section is not a bad battery. It means Tesla holds no reading for that car, nothing more - ask the seller to update the car and re-run it.
Implausible readings are discarded. A percentage outside a sane range means we misread the field, not that the pack is remarkable, so nothing is shown.

For what counts as normal degradation at a given age and mileage, see battery health & range.

What PulseCheck does not tell you

A verification is worth exactly as much as the things it's honest about not covering.

It is not a history report. Accidents, title branding and service history are paperwork about a VIN, and none of it comes from the car.
It is not an inspection. Nothing here tells you about tires, brakes, suspension knocks, panel gaps or how it drives.
It is not a quality rating. A salvage-title car can verify perfectly well. The badge means the details are real, not that the car is good.
Open service alerts aren't included. Those need a continuous connection to the car, and a one-time read deliberately doesn't have one.

Still do the walkaround. Still read the buying checklist. PulseCheck removes one category of doubt, not all of them.

What we can see, and what we can't

Sellers ask this constantly, so it's worth stating plainly for buyers too. The seller signs in on Tesla's own site - their password never passes through Elonslist, and we store no Tesla credentials at all. We don't request ongoing access, so the permission is spent after one reading and a fresh report needs fresh consent.

We can wake the car so it can answer - that's the only command we can send, and the only one we ever send. We never see location, drive history, charging history, or anything from the cameras.

For sellers

Verification comes with a PulseCheck Verified Listing. You buy it, connect your account, and the car fills in its own details - which also means fewer "is the FSD transferable?" messages, because the answer is already on the page.

Charge above 80% before you run it. That's the difference between a battery figure with high confidence and one we won't publish.