IM5 App?

[rgledhill]

Correct - it works perfectly with the VW and Polestar connectivity systems, but is rubbish with the Renault/Dacia, Stellantis and many others' systems. It's down to poor architecture design of the infrastructure, lazy coding and inappropriate technologies.
The same problem used to afflict BP Pulse slow chargers. The chargers didn't stay permanently connected; instead they polled the servers every 2 minutes. This means if you tried to start a charge via the app (there was no screen), you had to wait for 2 minutes or more sometimes! Lousy use of inappropriate technology, designed by clueless people.

 

[jamakr4]

The car uses the cellular network to connect to the central MG servers. The app connects to these servers over the internet.

Problems are caused when:

• The car has weak or no signal
• The servers are overloaded or down

Given that the car has wifi, it ought to be possible to connect to home wifi and always have the app working at home. But MG's implementation is poor.

In terms of having the car go to deep sleep, it would not have been hard to have a very low power cellular circuit listening for a wake up message from the network to make the car respond - like Wake-on-LAN for computers.

Also, properly designed the power drain is negligible compared to the enormous HV battery in the car.

There is also no excuse for having to refresh the app multiple times to get proper data to appear. This is just rubbish coding.

It should work seamlessly.

I do wonder sometimes if AI will save us NOT by having software that works, but by it taking on the manual processes of refreshing an app or locking and unlocking a car. So we will think everything is peachy but actually it just navigates a broken mess for us!

I actually had the car (MG4) in my wifi but it still happened various times so it's just a terrible design by MG.

 

[nigel4]

The car apps all seem to use the cellular network to communicate. I think most, certainly MG, do this via some central server. So that's three points of potential failure, plus the car could be in a deep sleep.

The Smart car app stopped working when the 3G network was turned off. Mercedes just not interested in legacy vehicles (they have stopped making the Smart)

 

[nigel4]

The Smart car app stopped working when the 3G network was turned off. Mercedes just not interested in legacy vehicles (they have stopped making the Smart)

PS getting an im5 it is going to be confusing using the iSmart app, when our other car is a Smart with no app