I wanted to bring details of my VW id.4 into HA so I could see charge and create automations with my new solar system. the current VW integration in HACs does not work with US based VW’s. digging around I found that the smartcar api did, so after lots of back and forth with AI (Gemini 2.5pro mostly) I have a working integration!
Smartcar works with a lot of different cars and has a free tier allowing 500 requests per month. ( 1000 is only 2.99 a month). The component is set to only request updates every 6 hours unless charging, in which case it will update every 30 minutes.
Ill wait and see if this updates data. I had to disable any entities that my car did not support, such as charging (this makes perfect sense), and now I am just waiting to see if it populates any info.
UPDATE:
I got it working with a button to trigger the automation and polling disabled and the screen did update. However the data isn’t correct. I’ll keep trying. Well, it’s all OnStar related. It’s a long story, but related to a situation a couple of years ago with them. Even MyChevrolet app doesn’t update properly. I had to go to my carport, which is 500+ft away from home to get their own app to update.
It does seem that Chevy/GM/OnStar limit the number of polling requests.
I got it installed and it updated once and then stopped.
I restarted HA later in the day and it updated. But it never updates. I restarted this morning and no data came in. It see in the Smartcar logs RATE LIMIT and other errors. It appears that it was polled just seconds after the previous poll. Error log screenshot
I disabled polling and put in an automation. The automation test fails also with RATE LIMIT but it says UPSTREAM, so maybe Chevrolet is limiting my polling.
Thanks for building this! Could be extremely useful.
I was using DIMO which was also built on SmartCar but they are discontinuing that integration and instead focusing on their own OBD2
I installed your HACS integration but can’t yet connect to Jaguar’s InControl interface – a SmartCar/Jaguar issue rather than your integration.
Could we have the option to change this to maximise the 500 free requests?
They do say RTFM: Customized polling
Thanks
LATER EDIT: This has been working great for me for a couple of months. Thanks for this!
If you’re able to get things working in their playground, then the integration should work for you.
Yeah, @tube0013 did the initial work to prove that the integration could work via AI. I got really excited about it, but found opportunities for improvement. I ended up rewriting most of the integration and after some back and forth with @tube0013 we decided to make some changes—like with polling—from how things were originally set up. However, RTFM is generally good advice. If you find any documentation issues or inconsistencies, open an issue on GitHub and we’ll get it sorted out!
Thanks for doing this, it seems like this could be a viable way of integrating my Jaguar i-Pace into HA, something I assumed would be easy but isn’t anymore!
Have you had a chance to play with the webhook update mechanism, rather than polling?
Hi All, first off, thank you! this really rocks. I have this installed and working for tire pressures, location, fuel level, oil live, and odometer, but I’m showing unavailable in HA for Door Lock.
On the smartcar side im seeing a 403 PERMISSION error. The suggested resolution and steps show:
Suggested Resolution
You can resolve this error by ensuring that the scope parameter contains all the permissions that your application requires and prompting the user to re-authenticate using Smartcar Connect.
Thanks for your work, really appreciated. Now, I confess, I’m a bit annoyed because I went from really happy that you made it work, to very sad that Volkswagen is not supported by Smarcar in Canada, so I’m still out of luck
I’ve been pretty frustrated with VW for their software capabilities as well. I doubt it would do much, but maybe write to VW as well as Smartcar. At the very least, you can cross your fingers that this would count as a vote for adding support.
Another solution to look at is the WiCAN Pro ODB sensor. While the VW support isn’t great it can read the SOC. And with some research other data can be brought in. MeatPi the maker of the WiCAN is also launching network module that has LTE for basically continuous monitoring even when not home.
I always come back to this as a possible solution. The concerns that always arrive for me are:
Battery drain: I’ve heard if you forget to turn these off and leave it parked for a while it could drain the battery (i.e. long term parking at an airport). It seems like it’d take a long time, but maybe there’s a 12V battery concern as well.
Security: I read that some can allow unlocking by a passer-by. I’m not sure under what conditions.
I never got around to trying one out, though. It seems like they’d be really nice with ABRP as well, so maybe still worth looking into in the future.
I wrote to Smartcar and offered my willingness to enroll to their “test program” for my ID4 in Canada. Also poked the CarConnectivity people with a request (GitHub - tillsteinbach/CarConnectivity: Python API to retrieve telemetry data from various car brands).
They have a connector for VW US, Auth URLs look very similar to the CA ones. If I find some time I would try to see if I can at least connect to CA Carnet…
Oh my, the last time I looked at the project from which this originated, I think it was EU VWs only. It’s moving quickly in a great direction. It’d be nice to get the data straight from VW rather than through Smartcar.
Hopefully they get this all somewhat stable and add support for other countries quickly.
I’m always wary of reverse engineering APIs/protocols, but it’d be nice to have all of the data if possible.
I drained mine once but it was my fault. They have pretty aggressive sleep now and it’s on by default in the firmware. So with that enabled it hasn’t been an issue. What I was mostly after was getting realtime charging feedback for automating with my solar. I’ve now got evcc running and can just plug in and once charging and the ECU is running the WiCAN is on with no 12v battery drain, but let’s be just charge based on excess solar production.
If you find any documentation issues or inconsistencies, open an issue on GitHub and we’ll get it sorted out!
