Emulating VW Car-Net functionality?

Hardware
1

Hey Everyone,

I recently purchased a 2019 VW e-Golf. The VW Car-Net service is not available for my car in the US. What hardware could I use to reproduce the functionality locally?

I was thinking a Bluetooth OBD dongle could read and report vehicle stats to Home Assistant. Is there anything like this available?

Thanks!!

2

Hi,

depending on your needs I had two things working in the past:

  1. Pushing excessive car data (which can be chosen) towards homeassistant using the Android App Torque and an OBD2 Reader.
  2. Just getting the mileage (and calculations and automations on top of it) using the smartphones GPS coordinates on High-Accuracy while the phone is connected to a BT device in the car

I guess Nr. 1 is what you want. Your HA needs to be accessible from the Internet, e.g. using an VPN connection and you need an MQTT broker Addon (e.g. the Mosquitto broker Addon). Within Torque you can configure your HA MQTT endpoint and which data to send.

Another option is to let Torque write a file and e.g use the AndroidApp Automate to send the data using MQTT (community script which can be edited to your needs).

Starting my car a BT device was powered, the phone connected to it and an Automate script started Torque which automatically transfered the live data home. Another script stopped Torque when the BT device disappeared.

One problem I had was after using another Wireguard service at home. Suddenly Torque could not send the data anymore, although everything else was fine like connecting to my homeassistant. This created a huge amount of data packages as Torque tried to send everything again and again. 5GB of data traffic in just a few hours. As long as this problem did not raise my 4GB of data per month were enough for Torque and everything else happening on the phone. Maybe the route cause of this problem has been already fixed as I stopped using this solution maybe 2 years ago. So I would say give it a try because it might be a lot easier to handle as using the file based solution.

Before buying a OBD2 dongle you’ll want to search a bit as many seem to be bad. I am using the EXZA HHOBD Gen.2 dongle since 2018 successfully with several VAG cars (Seat, VW) and even helped some people with theirs (BMW, …). So even if you stop using it for the purpose of sending data home it’s quite nice to analyze your car and its hiccups.