There is most likely an overlap on what you can get from the OBD port, but generally speaking the API will provide more high level info e.g driving status, mileage, live location - and the OBD port will provide more low level data e.g. detailed battery stats from the BMS, energy usage, etc.
Highlight where in the above post I am defending anything.
Something to note: Tesla has two vehicle APIs, the Fleet API for commercial accounts and the Owner API for individuals. This change currently only impacts the Fleet API.
If you are an individual owner who accesses your vehicle data from the Owner API (usually via a self hosted tool like TeslaMate), this does not affect you. Yet.
Not at all.
Lemmy is overwhelmingly militantly anti-Tesla, which is understandable considering who owns it, but it does mean that users tend to interpret any neutral or factual statements (basically anything that is not outright criticism) as having a pro-Tesla bias.
In this case, all I am stating is the fact that this specific change currently only affects corporate users. That could of course change in the future.
There is a rich history of cloud based data providers pulling the rug from under users with no warning. Look at what happened to Nest users when Google took over.