Using an Apple Watch App to Control a Tesla Electric Car

There is a great deal of buzz circulating about the Apple Watch, and although the wearable device won’t be available for purchase until April, app developers are currently working on innovative ways to utilize the forthcoming device.

Although most developers are keeping their apps in hiding at this point, a third-party Tesla app, created by Ukraine-based software company Eleks Labs, is offering a first look into a way that Tesla Model S owners could be able to control and monitor their cars from their wrist.

On its product page, the Eleks team explains that in addition to showing a Tesla vehicle’s location on a map, the app will allow users to check battery life, temperature and mileage as well as perform several tasks including locking and unlocking the doors, honking the horn and controlling the headlights.

To develop the app, the company used Apple’s WatchKit, which allows developers to create third-party apps for the forthcoming wearable device. As exciting as the new app in development by Eleks sounds, the company expressed serious concerns about the limitations of the WatchKit, including having no access to the Apple Watch accelerometer and gyroscope, no access to the Taptic Engine and no access to the device’s built-in speaker or microphone.

“We can now confidently say that creating anything really necessary and fully functional for Apple Watch with the current SDK version is very, very, difficult, and many of the things promised at launch that were perfect for some business ideas are not all available yet,” the Eleks development team wrote on its project page for the app.

Even with these limitations, the potential to have access to this type of functionality on the Apple Watch is exciting for Tesla owners and for the automotive industry as a whole.

The connection between the Tesla Model S and the Apple Watch seems to make perfect sense. The Model S is a hot topic in the automotive world, being seen as a luxury electric car featuring a long range and powerful performance, not to mention a high price tag. Similarly, the Apple Watch, although it hasn’t yet been released, is expected to make a huge splash when it goes on sale in April. Creating an app that connects these two entities to each other is likely to get a great deal of attention, and Eleks is clearly looking to carve out its own place in this realm.

It is not yet clear whether this app from Eleks will become a real product, but the concept is interesting regardless, and we’ll be watching closely to see how the project progresses in advance of the highly anticipated release of the Apple Watch.

“At first, the app was intended to be a demo of what the Apple Watch is capable of when designing apps for brands,” Eleks’ Markiyan Matsekh told Mashable. “But after such a reaction from both Apple Watch and Tesla aficionados we’ll definitely consider publishing it.”

Eleks published the following short video to illustrate how the Apple Watch app for Tesla could function: