No location update when vehicle is moving

[sshaikh]

The behaviour in a vehicle we are connected to only updates the location when for eg the door lock status changes. I understand that this is by design for some model of vehicle. Is there a way to confirm this (ie might providing signatures or some such improve the situation for this model?). Generally is there a registry of features against models that are confirmed to work/behave?

This makes location a bit unreliable even as a rough guide. Does anyone have any workaround to this? We understood that find vehicle prompts the vehicle to report in but this didn't seem to do anything in this instance (we still got the update on door lock).

Given that locking the doors does update the location, would (in theory) cycling the locks be a way to force update the location? Alternatively is there a more benign command that would update the location as a side effect?

[rikroe]

Are you talking about the Home Assistant integration or the CLI?

Generally to my knowledge, vehicles report their current state when they are shut off and locked, i.e. the vehicle's ICE (if available) is turned off and the car locked.
Then, the current state (including location) is sent to BMW servers and can be fetched by us.

Triggering a service (like locking/unlocking) always forces a refresh of the data from BMW servers.
If this is not the case for the find vehicle service, there might be a bug in the library.

[sshaikh]

No luck:

❯ bimmerconnected vehiclefinder $USERNAME $PASSWORD $REGION $VIN 100.0 0.0
Error retrieving vehicle position. Unknown position: Set observer position to retrieve vehicle coordinates!
ExecutionState.EXECUTED
{'gps_position': GPSPosition(latitude=x, longitude=y), 'heading': 25}

I'll have a go at debugging this.

[sshaikh]

The observer position wasn't being set in my version (bimmer-connected==0.16.0.0b2). After adding it, the guard fails if 0.0 is used :):

    if args.lat and args.lng:
        account.set_observer_position(args.lat, args.lng)

I've not tried calling this while the vehicle is in motion however.

[rikroe]

Ah, then try 0.1 0.1. This should pass the test. For most vehicles, the actual position does not matter (however it is required by the API to provide it).

[sshaikh]

I had the chance of running this while the vehicle was in motion:

❯ bimmerconnected vehiclefinder $USERNAME $PASSWORD $REGION $VIN 0.1 0.1
Error retrieving vehicle position. Vehicle in use: Vehicle Finder only works when your vehicle's ignition is turned off. Try again with the ignition off.
ExecutionState.EXECUTED
{'gps_position': GPSPosition(latitude=xxx, longitude=yyy), 'heading': 201}

I don't think I've seen that before (it may have been suppressed because of the observer setting). Does this confirm that the service doesn't work unless the car is off? (I'm yet to confirm the behaviour with the app).

[rikroe]

As this is not an error message written by me, this is the message of the API.
So at least for your vehicle, this only seems to work when the ignition is off.

[sshaikh]

Great, thanks for the confirmation. In that case it sounds like there's no further action to take on this ticket? Can close it if so.

[rikroe]

We can keep this as answered, as it might be interesting for future users.
I'll leave the issue open to be reminded to fix the GPS location detection sometime

[sincze]

Mmm..
While using the CLI (
Every 5 min to prevent 429) with my i4 location is updated. I grab the LAT and LON and push that to TRACCAR.
It also updates the address.