A huge thank you to the beta testing community for all of the feedback that went into this release, and am looking forward to getting back to vehicle onboarding as of today!

Statistics: Posted by jeff — Wed Jan 22, 2025 7:59 pm

More vehicle support: Honda Accord, RAM 1500, Lexus IS 300, Audi A4, Chevy Cruze, Wrangler 4xe, and Kona EV have been drawn, and more international VINs are now supported.

Speed limits can now be displayed in CarPlay for the road you're currently driving on. Add this widget in your vehicle's "CarPlay widgets" screen in Sidecar.

You can now analyze your historical OBD scan session data within Sidecar.

• Easily view any prior scan session and interactively analyze the most recent session. Easily scrub through your trip data and compare various signals over time.

Don't have a CarPlay unit in your car? You can now activate a CarPlay mode in Sidecar by flipping your phone to landscape with the Journey tab open.

Other improvements:

• More standard OBD parameters are now supported out of the box, including oxygen sensor readings, hybrid/ev voltage/current parameters, exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) data, and engine runtime.
• Classic Bluetooth scanners now auto-reconnect.
• Added support for byteLSB signal processing, enabling more vehicle signal decoding (Kona EV specifically, but likely more to come).
• The OBD terminal and parameters for your connected scanner now appear on the top level of the settings page during an active scanning session.
• Guess the Car now includes model years: the competition's getting harder!
• Polestar account authentication has been fixed.
• vLinker FS and MS are now supported.

Statistics: Posted by jeff — Sun Nov 24, 2024 6:03 pm

Introducing the ScanPlan!

• You can now get CarPlay and OBD scanning at a reduced price (30% less!) with the ScanPlan.
• Subscribe to the annual plan for the best value.

Enhanced CarPlay Experience

• Improved configurator for easier widget setup.
• Better widget support detection.

Onboarded vehicles

• Nissan Rogue
• Honda Accord
• Toyota Tacoma
• KTM RC 390
• Hyundai Tucson

Improved Hybrid Trip Logging

New filtering options for hybrid vehicle data:

• Fuel only
• Battery only
• Combined view

Document Scanning

You can now try document scanning without a subscription.

OBD Improvements

• Faster and more stable scanning
• Better handling of edge cases
• Improved failure resilience

Guess the Car

• Test your vehicle identification skills with the new Guess the Car widget
• Compete on the leaderboard
• Will get more difficult as more vehicles are onboarded

Technical Updates & Fixes

• Fixed a bug where OBDb parameter forks would not refresh
• Enhanced SAEJ1979 parameter support with more supported parameters and values
• Fixed a bug where the CarPlay Weather widget would not update if trip logging was disabled
• Expanded VIN decoder support for European, Indian, and Chinese models
• CarPlay will now remember your zoom level and orientation lock preferences across CarPlay sessions.
• CarPlay camera performance improvements resulting in smoother camera physics.
• Fixed a bug where tracks without album art would not show a placeholder in the Now Playing CarPlay widget.
• Fixed a bug where the OBD button would disappear in CarPlay after entering panning mode.

Statistics: Posted by jeff — Tue Nov 12, 2024 6:16 pm

CarPlay widgets: Now Playing and Weather

Two new widgets are now available, allowing you to see your currently playing music and album art and the local weather.

It's also now easier to set up CarPlay without having to enable trip logging or a subscription.

CarPlay media controls

You can now choose to swap the pan button with a next/previous button for easier media playback control right from within Sidecar.

Expanded vehicle support

Thank you to the beta testers that enabled Sidecar’s expansion of vehicle support to include more BMW, Lexus, and Toyota models! More cars should be able to pull more data automatically now.

More vehicles

New vehicle symbols are now available: Kia EV9 and BMW i3.

OBD parameter improvements

Several vehicles’ parameters were tuned since the last release, including the Taycan, Toyota Tacoma, and BMW X3.

The OBD scanners page has also been reorganized so that it's easier to see your scanners.

Bug fixes

• Fixed a bug where the camera would sometimes fly off to the side and then snap back in CarPlay. This mostly affected drivers closer to the north pole.
• CarPlay widgets now fit snugly into the corner above the CarPlay buttons.
• Various onboarding improvements.
• Landscape onboarding has been improved.
• Vehicle names now use a shortened year format.
• Fixed a broken link to the OBDb.
• CarPlay widgets now appear automatically if you only have one vehicle in your garage.
• Trip logger now only starts its wake up sequence if trip logging is enabled (this addresses a Motion and Activity prompt that would otherwise appear unnecessarily). Trip logging was not turning on as a result of this bug, but the permission prompt was appearing which was confusing.
• You can now request location access from CarPlay as part of the first-run experience. Requires your phone to be unlocked with Sidecar open.
• The entire "Add widget" row can now be tapped in the CarPlay widget editor.
• Various OBD scanner connection stability improvements.

Statistics: Posted by jeff — Mon Nov 04, 2024 6:53 am

CarPlay widgets  

You can now configure the Sidecar widgets that are displayed in CarPlay. Choose from vehicle state, range remaining, and tire pressure. New buttons have also been designed for the CarPlay UI, making them easier to see in more contexts.  

Improved trip logging  

The Sidecar trip logger has been fine-tuned and optimized to handle more edge cases. The trip logger will now conclude trips more confidently and handles transitions from car to walking and vice versa more consistently. The journeys timeline now also filters out noisy trips.

OBD parameter pinning  

You can now pin OBD parameters which will cause them to appear on your vehicle's home page and update in real time when connected to your car via OBD.

More hybrid refinements  

Hybrid vehicle widgets will now show any available information! If your hybrid is only reporting fuel data, this data will now be visible in the state widet.   

More vehicles  

New vehicle symbols are now available: Toyota bZ4X, Honda CR-V, and SEAT León.

OBDb  

Sidecar now uses the OBD-II Database (OBDb) as its official source for all OBD parameter information. The OBDb is an open source collective project to document vehicle diagnostics parameters and new vehicles are being added every week.

Battery optimizations  

Various features in Sidecar have been optimized to reduce battery usage.

Points of interest  

The points of interest will now only appear for vehicles that support the feature (specifically, the Porsche Taycan). This feature is expected to return for all cars in the future.

Bugs and crashes  

Various bugs and crashes have been resolved. Thank you to the beta testing community for the incredible feedback!

Statistics: Posted by jeff — Wed Oct 23, 2024 6:09 pm

Thank you to the Sidecar beta testers for making this release one of the biggest releases yet!

Notable improvements, by category:

CarPlay

Two significant bugs fixed:

1. Labels weren’t rendering properly.
2. The vehicle image would sometimes get offset from your current location.

Vehicle support

The IONIQ PHEV now has its own symbol.

• Hybrid vehicle battery widgets now show both fuel and battery history.

Trip logging

Trip reports are now shrink-wrapped, meaning idle times from the start and end of trips are now automatically trimmed. Trip reports are now more accurate as a result.

• Fuel state is now shown in trip reports and the journey timeline.
• Trip reports now use a moving average for fuel state.

Widgets

• The state widget’s fuel and battery bars no longer jump when moving to 100% for hybrid vehicles.
• The default vehicle preference and tapping widgets now correctly opens the app to the selected vehicle.
• You can now theme the State of Health widget’s colors. The default values have been tuned for typical State of Health values.

OBD scanning

• Fixed the “unsupported power” error in the OBD parameters.
• OBD scalar values can now be connected to the pluggedIn and isCharging parameters.

Quality

• Dark Mode icons have been tuned.
• Startup times have been improved by _50ms.
• The Latest Trip widget now shows a demo trip in the widget preview screen.

Statistics: Posted by jeff — Tue Oct 15, 2024 9:43 pm

Statistics: Posted by jeff — Fri Oct 11, 2024 6:07 am

Statistics: Posted by jeff — Fri Oct 11, 2024 5:29 am

First thing I'm focusing on is improving the trip analysis engine. The top-reported issue with trips has been that they tend to have a long trailing idle time. This is now fixed and will roll out in the next Sidecar release. Note that trip analysis happens in the background so it might take a minute or two for some trips to perform the latest analysis.

Here's a few example before/after images:

Note that both the beginning and end of trips will now be shrink-wrapped to the trip's active duration.

Statistics: Posted by jeff — Fri Oct 11, 2024 5:24 am

Polestar Connected Accounts are now in Beta. Securely log in with your Polestar account and access your Polestar vehicle data from your phone and watch.

Other improvements in this release include:

• Polestar Connected Accounts (Beta) allow you to view battery level, range remaining, charge rate, vehicle photos, and odometer values.
• New vehicle symbols: Ford Escape, IONIQ 6, Honda CR-V, Polestar 2.
• A Polestar 2 simulated vehicle is now available.
• Community page now points to the Cars Forum.
• Nissan Leaf VINs are now detected by OBD.
• UDS-compatible vehicles will now decode VINs via OBD as well.
• All supported OBD scanners are now linked from within the app.
• Logs page now shows a loading indicator while logs are being fetched.
• Fixed some bugs in the OBD handshake sequence when VINs can’t be detected.
• Minor layout issue fixed for accounts without vehicles in the Garage page.
• Improved support for tinted Apple Watch complications.
• Fixed a crash with MG account sync to the Apple Watch.
• Added several new OBD parameters for the Honda CR-V and IONIQ 5/6.

Statistics: Posted by jeff — Sun Oct 06, 2024 6:24 pm

Sidecar now supports vehicles that speak 26-bit CAN, such as Mercedes, Acura, and Honda, and many others. Sidecar can now detect VINs automatically from more vehicles, and more vehicles will work out of the box with the standard set of OBD parameters.

Sidecar now supports Tesla remote vehicle commands, such as climatization and locking your doors. This functionality works from your Apple Watch and iPhone, and it requires that you install a Sidecar Fleet Key on your vehicle for secure authentication. Follow the instructions in your Tesla account page in Sidecar to learn more.

Other improvements in this release include:

• Added kilopascals (kPa) as a tire pressure unit.
• Fixed layout bugs when using kPa in the tire pressure widgets and complications.
• Fixed the "displayLowTirePressureWarning" decoding error with Toyota accounts.
• Dark Mode app icons.
• New vehicles will now provide a link to the Sidecar beta testing program.
• Improved 404 errors for new vehicles.
• Fixed a bug where scanners might not reconnect automatically.

New vehicle support for:

• Porsche Cayenne
• Acura TLX, including new vehicle symbol and app icon
• Hyundai IONIQ 5, 6, PHEV

New OBD scanner support for:

• LELink²
• Vgate vLinker BM+
• Vgate iCar Pro 2S

Statistics: Posted by jeff — Wed Oct 02, 2024 8:40 pm

• Several new parameters added for the Porsche Cayenne including tire pressure.
• CarPlay now correctly shows OBD enumeration types (e.g. drive mode or fuel system status).
• OBD command throughput has been increased.
• Fixed various Toyota account decoding errors.
• You can now access the accounts page on the Apple Watch again.
• Fixed several crashing bugs on Apple Watch.
• VINs can now be copied in self-managed vehicle account pages.
• Fixed bug in Tesla account authorization from non-US locales.
• Improved error handling of recall fetching. Non-US vehicles will no longer show errors.
• The UI will no longer pull log tire levels over OBD if the values are out of sensible range.
• Self-managed vehicles (i.e. OBD-scanned vehicles) can now show tire pressure and range remaining.
• OBD commands that require manual flow control mode now indicate this in the parameter description.
• Fixed a crash in the consumption history page.
• Improved error handling UX for accounts with failed API calls.
• Tesla accounts can provide a link to installed Fleet Keys for running remote commands.

Statistics: Posted by jeff — Fri Sep 27, 2024 9:20 pm

• Chevrolet Bolt EUV now has a vehicle symbol.
• Climatization button on Apple Watch is now correctly centered.
• BAT_PWR is now BAT_SOC to align with the SAEJ1979 standard.
• BAT_SOC is now a Connectable, enabling state of charge polling for vehicles that support this standard parameter (e.g. the Chevy Bolt)
• Fixed a decoding bug with Toyota Connected Accounts (Beta).
• Fixed many decoding bugs with Tesla Connected Accounts (Beta).
• Tesla vehicles now correctly report their climatization enabled state.
• Tesla vehicles now show the target charge level on the State widget.
• Increased debounce fuzzing interval for OBD scanning sessions to reduce header churn (i.e. OBD scanning is now more efficient)
• Improved error handling in OBD readouts. Errors now look like errors.

Statistics: Posted by jeff — Thu Sep 26, 2024 3:23 am