Spotting a Tesla is fun on your own. Spotting them as a crew is better.
A team is a group of Tesla Radar devices that collect RadarPoints together. Everything each member spots still counts towards that member’s own RadarScore™ — and on top of that it counts towards the team’s. The teams are ranked against each other in the app, under Rankings → Teams.
What a team gets you
- A shared score. Teams are ranked by their team score over the last 30 days — the same rolling window every other Tesla Radar ranking uses. Every member contributes the square root of their own RadarScore™, and those contributions are added up. Two things follow from that, both deliberate: every member you bring in lifts the team, and a member who goes quiet never drags it down — while no single big scorer can carry a team on their own, so a full crew of steady spotters can out-rank a pair of heavy hitters. The team’s combined total and the mean per member are shown alongside it.
- A place in the team ranking, right next to the device, country and region leaderboards.
- A team page. Tap any team to see who is on it, ranked by RadarScore™ — plus the team’s score, its mean per member, its combined total, how many Teslas it has spotted in the last 30 days, and a link to the team’s own website if it has one.
- A badge. Team members carry their team’s short tag next to their device in the device ranking.
How the team score works
Every member contributes the square root of their own RadarScore™ over the last 30 days. Those contributions are added up, and the sum is multiplied by 10 so the result reads like points rather than like a statistic:
team score = 10 × ( √score₁ + √score₂ + … + √scoreₙ )
A worked example. Three teams, all real-world plausible:
| team | members | combined RadarScore | mean | team score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ten steady spotters | 10 | 1366 | 136 | 1157 |
| two heavy hitters | 2 | 2778 | 1389 | 716 |
| ten casual spotters | 10 | 440 | 44 | 663 |
The ten steady spotters win, despite being beaten on combined total by the pair and on the mean by a mile. That is the intended result.
Why not something simpler?
Because the two obvious formulas both fail, in opposite directions.
Adding the scores up turns the leaderboard into a hunt for one big spotter. Tesla Radar’s activity is wildly uneven: in a typical 30-day window the busiest device picks up a couple of hundred times more Teslas than the median active one. Under a plain sum, a two-person team holding one of those devices beats ten dedicated spotters without trying, and everyone else’s contribution is rounding error.
Averaging the scores — which is what the team ranking did until Tesla Radar 2.0.16 — has the opposite problem: it punishes you for recruiting. Every member below the team’s current average lowers the team score, so the winning move is to keep the team small and turn people away. That is a bad rule for something called a team.
The square root sits between the two. Each member’s contribution keeps growing with their score, so effort always pays — but it grows slowly, so a spotter with 100× another’s score contributes 10× as much, not 100×. Adding the two effects together:
- Every member helps. A contribution is never negative, so bringing someone in can only raise the team score. Nobody has to be turned away, and nobody has to be nudged out for a quiet month.
- No one carries the team alone. The best individual spotter in Tesla Radar is worth roughly fifteen typical ones, not two hundred, so a full crew of ordinary spotters is genuinely competitive against a superstar.
- The leaderboard stays tight. Teams end up within a few times of each other rather than orders of magnitude apart, which is what makes chasing the team above you worth doing.
So yes: it is more complicated than “add them up”. The simple version was tried first, and both simple versions produce a ranking nobody would want to play in.
The ground rules
- A device does not have to be in a team. Teams are entirely optional.
- A device can be in one team at a time. Opening another team’s invite link moves your device over — you cannot collect for two teams at once.
- A team holds up to 10 devices. Once it is full, its invite link stops admitting anyone new.
- Teams are not self-service. They are set up by hand, on request, which keeps the team ranking a list of real crews rather than a list of throwaway accounts.
- Joining a team needs data sharing switched on in the app — that is the channel your device uses to tell the backend which team it belongs to.
How to get a team
Ask us for one. Send a short message on either of these:
- LinkedIn — linkedin.com/company/teslaradar
- Mastodon — @teslaradar@teslapwners.club
Tell us:
- the team name you want (up to 40 characters),
- an optional short tag for the badge (up to 8 characters, e.g.
SBG), - an optional website for the team, which we will show on the team page.
We will create the team and send you back a join link — plus the same link as a QR code. It looks like this:
https://www.teslaradar.com/t/?t=your-team&s=<secret>
It is an ordinary web link on purpose, so it stays tappable in a message, a mail or a post, and scannable by any camera. On Android it opens straight in Tesla Radar; anywhere else it lands on a page that hands it over to the app.
How people join
That link is the membership. Pass it around your crew — as a link, or by letting people scan the QR code:
- A prospective member opens the link (or scans the code) on a device that has Tesla Radar installed.
- Tesla Radar catches it, and asks them to confirm that they want to join the team.
- From then on, everything that device spots also counts for the team. The join shows up in the rankings within a few minutes.
Once you are in a team, the app can show you the invite link and QR code again — open My Team in the menu, and share it from there. Anyone you send it to can join, so treat it like a key and share it only inside your crew. If a link ever gets out, ask us to rotate the team’s secret: the old link stops working immediately, and everyone already on the team stays on it.