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.
