A Better Route Planner 4.3.2 Adds Live Data Sources
I know I said I wouldn’t do it, but I ended up breaking down and buying a OBD II BTLE dongle to use with ABRP; actually bought a second one a couple weeks ago to troubleshoot a problem with Android 13. And for the most part, it’s been working great to provide consumption and state-of-charge (SoC) data to the app for better routing results. But, frankly, it’s not a great solution more generally for a few reason. First, BTLE dongles kind of suck. Second, needing to buy a OBD II dongle at all sucks even more because the data is there, the car can share it with apps, it just doesn’t (at least on Android Auto).
So these release notes intrigued me because not needing a dongle is a big step forward. Unfortunately, the how seems kind of kludgy. It seems to rely on a 3rd party service called SmartCar, which looks to interact with the OEM’s API to pull the data presented by this 3rd party status widget.
Which is probably fine for planning purposes, but not great for real time usage. Now of course I could be wrong here. Maybe it uses magic :).
What I don’t understand is why Android Auto doesn’t have this data, and make it available to mapping apps. That seems like the right approach; let’s get on that Google.
We are proud to present a new major release of ABRP with lots and lots of updates and improvements for all EV drivers out there!
- For ABRP Premium subscribers, we now offer a live data connection to your EV over-the-air for a wide variety of supported car brands! The data quality is limited to what the specific car reports over-the-air and can be used as a super-convenient way to get live data or as a complement to more detailed data e.g. via ABRP OBD connection.
- CarPlay has received a lot of love, and we have added next charger information (with availability), charge time flags, a lot more descriptive UI and lots of other improvements.
- Android Auto has been updated to display more information on the next charge stop.
- Our EV library has been significantly updated using data from live data connections – many models are now moved to mature level, cold weather heating has been improved and much more. Perhaps most importantly, we have removed the consumption margin we have had since the beginning of ABRP, and we’re now showing our best-estimated consumption/range estimates instead of pessimistic values. To show the fact that weather does play a large role, we have added “seasonal weather” for all users, turned on by default. This will account for shorter range in typical winter periods, depending on your location.
- Favorite settings have been added below the address input.
- Navigation instructions have been significantly improved with much more lane information, signs, and symbols – including voice instructions.
Finally, we have fixed tons of bugs and made the app faster and more beautiful.