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.

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.
• Correct any guess with bavariandata.set_trip_class or the tap-to-edit control on the trips card.

The monthly sensor and summaries

• One Driving Distance (This Month) sensor per vehicle carries the monthly total and the business/private/commute split.
• The detail lives in the services (and the card), not a flood of entities:
  • bavariandata.get_trips — recorded trips as response data.
  • 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.