Feature Entities and Devices

Entities & devices

One device per VIN

Each VIN on your account becomes its own Home Assistant device. A separate integration-level "CarData Debug Device" carries the diagnostics entities (stream connection, quota, last-message timestamps).

Descriptor entities

Every descriptor BMW streams becomes a native entity:

• Streamed descriptors become sensors and binary sensors, named from a curated English title set (baked into the catalogue and the HA translations). German names ship too — open an issue or PR if a name looks off.
• Numeric fields get sensible device classes; distances use device_class: distance, and odometer/mileage uses state_class: total_increasing so long-term statistics work.
• Every entity exposes its source timestamp plus its catalogue cluster and category as attributes — the dashboard card uses these to group values regardless of the user's HA language.

The full field-per-cluster catalogue lives in telematics-fields.md.

Derived & diagnostic entities

These aren't sent by BMW — the integration derives them. They are named from the integration's own translations (so German installs get German names too).

Entity	What it is
Charged Energy (Total)	Monotonic kWh counter (device_class: energy, state_class: total_increasing). Add to the Energy dashboard.
Charged Energy (Session)	Resets at the start of each charging session.
Charging Energy (This Month)	Monthly charged-energy total.
Charging Cost (This Month)	Monthly cost — only once a price source is set.
Charging Cost (Last Session)	Cost of the most recent session — only with a price source.
Charging Cost per 100 km	Needs the odometer and two sessions to measure a distance.
Battery Health	Learned usable capacity (kWh), with vs-new %, sample count and a capacity-vs-mileage trend.
Driving Distance (This Month)	Monthly distance + business/private/commute split.
API Quota Remaining	Diagnostic: requests left in the 50/24 h window.
State-of-charge estimate / rate	Extrapolated SoC helpers (need the Electric vehicle cluster).
Stream Connection Status	Diagnostic: MQTT connection state.
Last Message Received	Diagnostic: timestamp of the last stream payload.
Last Telematics API Call	Diagnostic: timestamp of the last REST call.

Vehicle image

Each VIN also gets an image entity holding BMW's rendered picture of the car. It is cached and survives restarts, so it doesn't burn quota on every boot; refresh it manually with bavariandata.fetch_vehicle_image.

Device tracker

Each VIN gets a device_tracker ("car") carrying the vehicle's location from the GPS stream, usable on the HA map and in zone-based automations.

Why some entities are "unavailable"

Entities keep exposing their cluster/category attributes even when restored or unavailable, because the card's cluster views depend on them. An entity may read unavailable until the car next streams that descriptor — trigger a lock/unlock in the MyBMW app to prompt an update.