How reliable is the app for you when calling any of the remote services like climatize, lights, locking / unlocking doors? Mine is a toss and I've been trying to figure out why. While my car is parked in a garage, I have strong 4G service there and so I don't think it's the issue. The pattern I've noticed is that if the car is actively charging or if it's been a short time since I personally interacted with it, then the remote services seems to work fine. However, after it's been "idle" for several hours or overnight, it feels like the car is in some sort of deeper sleep state and doesn't wake when I use the remote services. Calls within the app or widget just spin forever and eventually fail. One possible cause is my dashcam. When the car is off, the camera continues recording in event-based mode, and so it does slowly draw down the 12V battery. When I start the car occasionally, it reports a "battery drain while stopped" error. So one possibility is that the car shuts off remote services when it detects that. My recollection though is that the services have always been spotty, even before I installed the dashcam. I was wondering if anyone else has experienced this and if you were able to fix it somehow?
It does seem to have something to do with the 4G signal, even though it looks strong on your phone. At home, I don’t generally have issues activating remote services, but where I park at work my phone indicates a strong signal and yet remote services fail probably close to 50% of the time.
It’s quick in a parking lot, slow in my garage (which has horrible service.) Haven’t seen it fail yet. For your dash cam you could consider a dash cam battery. I wired one up to charge while driving (and on EVSE,) then park mode from runs entirely from that battery only. Fits under the passenger seat. No warnings about excessive drainage and lasts longer than I’ve ever been parked.
Anybody else having trouble with it this morning? It started with Alexa telling me there was a problem and she couldn’t “ventilate my Cooper” so when I finished my coffee I went to get my phone and it also failed with the app, and gave me a generic error.
It worked just fine in a multilevel parking garage in the epicentre of downtown today, so I’m still sticking with the crappy 4G theory. My home in the suburbs is in kind of a dead zone, when I first got a 4G iPhone, it kept locking onto the 3G signal, and then when I got a 5G iPhone I still barely get two bars of 4G at home.
Have you tried turning on wi-fi calling (it exists on iPhone, not sure about Android)? Cellular at my house is poor because my house is essentially a Faraday cage and the nearest cell tower is over five miles away, but with wi-fi calling my phone service goes over my wi-fi, which improves quality.
I have that turned on, but I can also make cell calls (it’s rare!) here. That won’t help my car get data packets, though.
Good point. I was thinking about the app-to-MINI backend communication, but duh that would be over wi-fi anyway. It's the car not being able to "check in" that's likely the issue.
After more trial and error, I've determined that the remote service outage in my case was caused by my dashcam's parking mode. In parking mode, the camera continues recording at reduced levels to capture events while you're away from the car. This draws from the 12V battery which the car does not like at all. If it detects any sort of unexpected drain, it shuts everything down, including the service that listens for remote commands. Setting my hardwire kit to the highest voltage cutoff (i.e., minimal drain) made no difference. The exception seems to be scheduled climatize. When the car wakes up to do this, there's a short window that it continues listening for remote commands before it shuts down again. So a "workaround" would be to schedule it to run everyday, but the practical application for this are probably limited. Thus, if you want parking mode for your dashcam and reliable remote services, you'll need to either add an external battery for the dashcam that's connected to switched power only or find a dashcam that has geofencing capabilities.
