Read EV battery/charge state and start or stop charging through the Smartcar API
domain: smartcar.com · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Complete Smartcar Connect (OAuth) for the vehicle with the required scopes covering battery read and control-charge permissions.
GET the EV battery endpoint to retrieve state-of-charge percentage, and GET the charging status endpoint to determine whether the vehicle is plugged in and/or charging before issuing any command.
POST to the vehicle's charge control endpoint with an action of START or STOP to remotely begin or end a charging session.
Handle brand-specific constraints explicitly — e.g. some Nissan vehicles only support START (not STOP) in the US, and GM brands (Chevrolet/GMC/Buick/Cadillac) require the battery be at or above roughly 50% before either START or STOP will succeed.
Use Smartcar's simulator/webhook tooling in development to validate charge state transitions without needing a physical vehicle for every test cycle.
Known gotchas
Not all vehicle makes support both START and STOP identically — code written against a generic EV can silently no-op or error on brands with asymmetric support, so branch on the vehicle's actual supported capabilities.
The battery-capacity and start/stop charge control endpoints were introduced as separate, later-added API surfaces (some in early access) — an app registered before their release may not have access without requesting the newer scopes/endpoints.
OEM backend latency means Smartcar's charge-control action can return success at the API layer well before the vehicle's own telemetry reflects the new charging state — polling immediately after a command can show stale state.
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