Automating the car may sound drastic, but the point is to be able to take advantage of the car’s capabilities into your smart home.
Most new cars have an app that you can set e.g. when to drive and thus the car will be hot at the right time. But what if you let this go? What if the smart house had arranged this for you? Had it not been very comfortable?
We have integrated our Volvo with the smart home, and thus we can take advantage of several opportunities that open up there. Here you can, among other things, start/stop the heater, see the battery and the amount of fuel that is left and see if doors are open/closed or locked.
Based on this information, it is also possible to make some automations.
Let’s assume that you work shifts, and thus start and end at work at different times each day. With the help of the smart house, the integration of the car, the integration of your calendar, and a little automation – you can always get to a warm car when you drive home from work in the afternoons.
The trigger on the automation here is a template. Tempalten will check the appointment in your calendar and how much time is left of it. In our example, the automation will start 15 minutes before the agreement expires. This can be adjusted according to how long in advance to start heating the car.
{{ ((as_timestamp(states.calendar.YOUR_CALENDAR.attributes.end_time) – as_timestamp(now())) < 900) }}
We have also added two conditions to our automation. One check if the car is in the right place. We can do this because the car reports the GPS position via the API and that we have created a zone in Home Assistant.
The other thing we check is the temperature outside.
This means that we do not drive the automation if the car is not at work (have time off / is ill etc), and that we do not start heating the car if it is hot outside.
The last thing is to perform the action. That is, start the warm-up. In Home Assistant, this will be a switch, and then just turn on this switch.v
Then it is just to enjoy a hot car for winter when you are going home from work