Lukas Heim
Back to projects
•
3 min read
Tesla Car Configurator

Tesla Car Configurator UI

A fully interactive web UI for customizing a Tesla Model Y. Users can change the exterior, interior and wheels, with a real-time pricing summary that updates instantly.

Tesla Configurator

đź’» Technologies Used

Built entirely with core web technologies—no frameworks—focusing on simplicity, structure, and maintainability.

  • Vanilla JavaScript → Interactive logic and DOM manipulation
  • HTML5 → Semantic structure and accessibility
  • Tailwind CSS → Utility-first styling, responsive layout, and clean design

✨ Key Features

  • Dynamic Customization → Exterior, interior and wheels can be swapped with a click
  • Real-Time Pricing → Total cost updates instantly as options change
  • Responsive Design → Optimized for both desktop and mobile devices

🧠 Learnings & Takeaways

This project was a deliberate return to fundamentals after working extensively with React and Next.js. Building with plain JavaScript helped me sharpen skills that sometimes get abstracted away by frameworks:

  • Deeper DOM Understanding → Working without a virtual DOM forced me to think carefully about element creation, updates, and cleanup.
  • Event-Driven UI → Managing state purely through event listeners gave me a better grasp of how interactions flow at the lowest level.
  • Separation of Concerns → Keeping logic, structure, and styling clearly separated made the codebase easier to maintain—an approach that carries over to larger React/Next.js projects.
  • Appreciation for Frameworks → While vanilla JS is great for small projects, this exercise highlighted how frameworks simplify state management, component reuse, and scaling.

Overall, this was a valuable refresher that strengthened my core frontend skills and gave me a better appreciation for the trade-offs between “vanilla” JavaScript and modern frameworks.

🚀 Getting Started

To run this project locally, simply clone the repository and open the index.html file in your web browser. No special server or build tools are required.

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/heim-lukas/tesla-configurator-vanilla-js.git

# Navigate into the project
cd tesla-configurator-vanilla-js

# Open in your browser
.\index.html

Credits

This project was inspired by and built following the “Build A Tesla Car Configurator | Tailwind & Vanilla JavaScript” tutorial by Traversy Media.

You can view the full tutorial here: YouTube - Build A Tesla Car Configurator.