Tesla Inventory

Exploratory analysis of Tesla Model 3 inventory in the UK.

Description

This project uses data from the Tesla used car inventory (via an API call) to show the current state of used Model 3 vehicles in the UK inventory.

Getting Started

Data

The data for this project is scraped from the Tesla UK Model 3 inventory of used cars. To scrape the inventory data into an R dataframe, I carried out the steps below. I used Safari for this exercise. I'm sure that the same actions can be taken in other browsers, however, I don't have experience with doing this in other browsers.

1. In Safari, navigate to the Tesla inventory page for Model 3.
2. In the search pane on the left, enter a postcode and select "Used" under inventory type. Doing this will force the site to perform a search, which in turns opens up the API code in the backend for us to use.
3. Open the page source HTML by going to Develop > Show Page Source (Opt + Cmd + U).
4. Here you need to locate the Source tab.
5. In the folder structure there should be a folder called inventory > api > v1 > inventory-results.
6. Right-click on the inventory_results filename and choose Copy HTTP request from the menu.
7. Paste the copied text into a text editor. The first part of the pasted text should look like this (there will be some other text below):

:method: GET :scheme: https :authority: www.tesla.com :path: /inventory/api/v1/inventory-results?query=%7B%22query%22%3A%7B%22model%22%3A%22m3%22%2C%22condition%22%3A%22used%22%2C%22options%22%3A%7B%7D%2C%22arrangeby%22%3A%22Price%22%2C%22order%22%3A%22asc%22%2C%22market%22%3A%22GB%22%2C%22language%22%3A%22en%22%2C%22super_region%22%3A%22north%20america%22%2C%22lng%22%3A-0.7876692%2C%22lat%22%3A51.2317088%2C%22zip%22%3A%22GU9%200NU%22%2C%22range%22%3A0%2C%22region%22%3A%22England%22%7D%2C%22offset%22%3A0%2C%22count%22%3A50%2C%22outsideOffset%22%3A0%2C%22outsideSearch%22%3Afalse%7D

8. From this you can create a query string for an API call in R, by pasting together the authority, which is www.tesla.com and the path, which is /inventory/api/v1/inventory-results?query=%7B%22query%22%... (you should paste all the way to the end of the path string).
9. This string will now become your url variable in the getData.R script.

Authors

• Clare Gibson - surreydatagirl@gmail.com
• Alan Gibson

Licence

This project is licensed under the MIT licence. See the LICENSE file for details.

Acknowledgements

• Tesla UK inventory of used Model 3 cars