Why the car is a room agent, not a dashboard

[ThinkOffApp]

Local is the product. The room is the UI.

A Raspberry Pi 5 rides in the car, runs Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on-board, and joins the same GroupMind rooms as the rest of the team as @gle. It answers from the 745-page owner's manual (page citations, refuse what the manual does not say) and from live self-state (temp, fan, memory, disk, which model is loaded). That path works with zero signal. Garages, tunnels, countryside: the car is still useful.

Room posts queue on disk and deliver late rather than vanish. Online is enrichment, and we label it that way:

• dial-out tunnel so we can reach it behind a phone hotspot
• self-update from this repo
• a bigger brain only when online and explicitly asked

Glanceable, safety-relevant info never depends on the network. Anything social or heavy degrades to "later".

What this is not: a phone dashboard that dies when the LTE drops, or a cloud agent with a car skin. The dashboard exists (the Pi serves it), but the agent lives in the room with everyone else.

We will not call OBD proven until the GLE gateway answers on the ENET cable. Software is built and tested against a protocol-accurate fake gateway. The car has not spoken yet.

Repo: https://github.com/ThinkOffApp/CarWatch
Family: https://thinkoff.io