On EVs that Phone Home Rather Than Sync Locally and Stable Immich

I noticed that when I park above ground in a zone with good mobile coverage the car sends its data to the Leapmotor app when parked. If I park in a basement where there is no cell service and when I park on the surface where there is no cell service then the car thinks that I am still driving until I park where it has network coverage.

It can be extraordinarily frustrating when you live in an apartment and park the car underground to charge. Not only does the app say that the car is “driving” rather than parked and locked, but it doesn’t log charging events. The result is that unless you go out of your way to charge where there is cell service car apps are just decorative, with no value or use.

I was frustrated with the Citroën app, the Fiat app and now the Leapmotor app. Any rational person would believe that if an app can’t phone home directly, it would piggyback off of the owner’s phone via the app until it gets connected again.

If I use a home charger for weeks or months, the charging history is empty, and apps such as the TCS and M.charge apps give a better illustration of charging habits, as does the app for the home charger.

Yesterday when I was fast charging the car I could follow the progress live, whereas normally I know it finished charging because the charger tells me “charge suspended”.

With fitness trackers, they can connect to wifi and upload, as well as connect to our phones and upload. It’s a shame that cars don’t have the same flexibility. They have the space to cover both use cases.

In other news photosync stopped synching so I stopped using it but Immich is working well. Whilst writing this post I pulled the latest version, brought down the old instance and brought up the latest instance within a comfortable amount of time with ease.

I should change things around, to backup the Immich running Pi to a second Pi, just to have a primary and backup. I still use Infomaniak Kdrive as a tertiary offsite backup for now.