Feature Trips

Trips / driving journal

Every drive is reconstructed from the stream and kept: distance, duration, start/end places, SoC used, and BMW's own per-trip consumption, recuperation and driving-style figures. No REST quota.

Not a tax-office-compliant logbook (kein Finanzamt-konformes Fahrtenbuch). This is a trip journal and expense helper; it has no legal tamper-resistance.

How trips are detected

Trips are reconstructed from live GPS in the stream (the integration tracks distance along the GPS track), so no configuration is needed. Make sure the Electric vehicle and location descriptors are enabled in step 4.

The times on a trip

A drive is noticed later than it starts and closed later than it ends — BMW's position stream can go quiet for minutes at a time, and a trip only closes once the car has sat still for five. The recorded start and end are corrected for that, so they read as driving times rather than detection times:

• Start — when the car was last seen parked, if your car streams its driver door (the door closing means the driver just got in) and it closed within the last five minutes. Otherwise the first position fix that showed movement.
• End — the last position fix that showed movement, not the moment the five-minute stop timer expired. If the driver door opening ends the drive instead, that is the arrival.

Both are still estimates bounded by how often your car reports its position: a long gap in the stream is a long gap in what can be known.

When the position stream goes quiet

"No movement seen for five minutes" has two very different causes: the car stopped, or the stream did. Only the first ends a drive — closing on the second used to split one drive through a tunnel or a coverage hole into two trips.

So a stop is only acted on once something confirms it: a position report that arrived showing the car standing still, or an explicit "not moving" from cars that send one. With neither, the drive is held open until the reports come back and settle it — if the car has moved on, it was one drive all along; if it reappears where it vanished, it really was parked and the trip ends back at the last movement. A stream that never comes back closes the trip after half an hour, and because the end is backdated either way, a late close costs no accuracy.

Seeing the drive that's happening now

A drive in progress is not in the journal yet — it has no end, no final distance and nothing to classify — so it is surfaced separately, live:

• A Trip in Progress binary sensor per vehicle: on while a drive is under way, with the trip so far as attributes — started, start_location, distance_km, duration_s, soc_start, soc_now, energy_kwh, last_movement and held.
• On the card: a badge on the overview (distance and minutes so far, tap it for the attributes) and a live row at the top of the trips view — where you came from, the distance and time so far, and the route so far on a map when route recording is on.
• In bavariandata.get_trips: an open_trips list alongside the recorded ones.

Two things to know before you automate on it:

• It is not a "car is moving" sensor, which is why it isn't named one. It tells you a trip is open. A trip opens on the first position report that shows movement and closes five minutes after the last one — longer while the stream is quiet (see above), which is what parking underground looks like. So it stays on for some minutes after you arrive, and up to half an hour if the car parked somewhere with no reception. The recorded trip's end is backdated correctly regardless; it is only the live flag that lingers. Use the last_movement attribute if you need the finer question.
• The figures are provisional. Distance comes from the odometer, which only ticks in whole kilometres, so it reads unknown for the first minute or so of a drive and then falls behind the GPS track a little. The final record is computed at close from the better of the available sources.
• Nothing survives a restart: an in-flight trip lives only in memory, so restarting Home Assistant mid-drive ends the trip and the flag goes off.

Privacy by default

Endpoints are stored as place names, never coordinates:

• A point inside a Home Assistant zone shows that zone's name.
• A point outside any zone is stored as an address only if you enable reverse geocoding under Configure → Trips (trip_geocode). That sends the endpoint coordinates to OpenStreetMap's Nominatim; the resulting address string is stored, and the coordinates themselves are never persisted.

Recording the route (opt-in)

By default a trip keeps only its named endpoints — enough for the journal, but not enough to draw a map. Turn on Record route under Configure → Trips (trip_track) and each new trip additionally stores its GPS track: the polyline of coordinates along the drive, each stamped with its time, so a map can show where the car went and replay the drive.

• This is the only setting that writes raw coordinates to disk — including your exact start and end points — which is why it is off by default and independent of address resolution.
• It takes effect on the next trip that starts; trips already recorded keep whatever they were captured with, and an in-progress drive keeps the setting it began with.
• The track rides the trip record and is returned by bavariandata.get_trips (as a track list of points). Each point is [lat, lon, t], where t is whole seconds since the trip started — so a map can animate the route in real time and colour it by pace. Routes recorded before this was added store two-element [lat, lon] points and read back without timing; there is no way to backfill their times. The track is never included in the CSV / printable export, which stays place-names-only.
• The track is bounded and lightly downsampled, so even a long multi-hour drive stays a compact route rather than an unbounded stream of fixes. A stop shows up as a single point whose gap to the next stamp records how long the car sat.

Once routes are recorded, the dashboard card's Trip map view (view: map) draws them on a map, coloured by classification and filterable by time window (see the card).

Classification

Drives auto-classify as business, private or commute:

• Set a work zone under Configure → Trips (trip_work_zone) so home↔work drives are recognised as commutes.
• Everything else is filed as your Default type (trip_default_class) — Private out of the box. Choose Business if that is the honest default for your driving, or Leave unclassified to sort every trip by hand.
• Correct any guess with bavariandata.set_trip_class or the tap-to-edit control on the trips card.

Automatic classification is only ever a starting point: a trip you classified yourself is never overwritten, and changing these settings does not touch trips that are already recorded.

A commute with a stop on the way

Buying groceries between home and work parks the car long enough that the detector records two drives, neither of which is home→work on its own. The Commute stop tolerance (trip_commute_gap, default 30 minutes) covers that: if the car stands no longer than this between one drive ending and the next beginning, the drives form a chain, and a chain that runs from one commute zone to the other counts as commuting — all of its legs, retroactively. The stops stay visible as separate trips in the journal; they are just all badged commute.

Home ──12 min──▶ Supermarket ──[22 min stop]──▶ Work     both legs = commute
Home ──8 min───▶ Bakery ──────[15 min stop]───▶ Home     both legs = private
Work ──5 min───▶ Lunch ───────[40 min stop]───▶ Work     both legs = private

Details worth knowing:

• A chain ends when it reaches home or work, so a lunch run out of the office and back doesn't get pulled into the morning commute.
• Both ends of the chain are checked, not any endpoint — a round trip that starts and finishes at home stays private, however many stops it had.
• Up to five drives may form one chain. A longer string of short hops is a day of running around, so it keeps the default type.
• Stops shorter than about five minutes never split a drive in the first place, so this setting governs the band above that. Set it to 0 to switch chaining off entirely.

The monthly sensor and summaries

• One Driving Distance (This Month) sensor per vehicle carries the monthly total and the business/private/commute split.
• One Trip in Progress binary sensor per vehicle for the drive happening now — see above.
• The detail lives in the services (and the card), not a flood of entities:
  • bavariandata.get_trips — recorded trips as response data, plus open_trips for a drive still under way.
  • bavariandata.get_driving_summary — the "month in review": distance (vs last month), the split, consumption, recuperation, a driving-style score, top destinations, and (with a tariff) an estimated driving cost.

Viewing & exporting

• The view: trips card.
• Export to CSV or a printable report.