Ah the pull to refresh doesn't affect your OBD scanner data. I should disable pull to refresh on the vehicle page actually if the vehicle doesn't have a network-backed account. Pull to refresh in the parameters page only refreshes the set of parameters, so I should probably disable it there too because I can understand why you'd think it would refresh the parameter values themselves.
So long as you're connected to your OBD scanner in the car, the sensor data will be polled automatically either when you're looking at the parameter, or if it's a Connectable, automatically at the interval defined by the parameter. Some Connectables, like vehicle speed, will update frequently (4 times per second), while other Connectables such as tire pressure will change update less frequently.
I had some issues getting the scanner to connect in the app this time. I ended up having to turn it on and off with the switch on the cable a few times before Sidecar would connect to it.
Just finished a deep dive debugging session untangling some logic that was causing scanners not to get properly disconnected between sessions, which resulted in a race condition that could cause reconnections to stall out. This fix will go out in the v1.16.3 release
Any chance that could also cause the trips to not get logged correctly? I’ve noticed that when I go for a drive if I launch sidecar in CarPlay I see it following along but then later in the day when I look, my trips are either merged into one or missing.
One thing to confirm: do you have Sidecar's location access set to "Always" in the system Settings app?
There is a known bug with the trip logger where it will sometimes not detect that you've transitioned from a driving activity to a walking one, which might be related here. I'll look into this for the next Sidecar release.