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Volkswagen Carnet API shutdown

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Revision as of 17:48, 30 May 2026 by Louis (talk | contribs) (added home assistant vs official app capability table so non-technical readers see what was actually lost; dual-cited every row, mostly against vw uk's own services page)

On May 27, 2026, Volkswagen Group silently disabled the authentication flow that third-party software had used for years to read & control its vehicles, breaking the widely deployed Home Assistant integration homeassistant-volkswagencarnet & the open-source EV charge controller evcc.[1][2] The cutover extended across the Volkswagen, Audi, Škoda & Cupra brands.[3][4] The new token endpoint requires a cryptographic attestation tying each request to an official VW Group app, locking out community clients that had previously authenticated with stored owner credentials alone.[2][4] Volkswagen published no press release; the official explanation surfaced on a private Škoda owners' Facebook group, telling owners that apps lacking a formalised relationship with VW Group Info Services would no longer be able to access vehicle data.[3]

Background

The We Connect service is the cloud backend for Volkswagen Group's connected-vehicle features: state-of-charge reporting, remote charge control, climate pre-conditioning, lock & unlock, departure timers, & location. The community homeassistant-volkswagencarnet integration that exposed those features to home automation began with support for the Passat, Golf, e-Golf, Tiguan, & later expanded to the ID series.[5]

Volkswagen already monetises consumer access to those features. The German tech press reported that VW had been shifting paid data access toward business customers, with Schmidtisblog noting that the company "verweist bereits auf kostenpflichtige Business-Schnittstellen für Firmenkunden" ("already points to paid business interfaces for corporate customers").[6]

For owners who wanted to do something the official app could not, such as charging an EV only when rooftop solar generated surplus power, capping state-of-charge at a battery-friendly level, or pre-conditioning the cabin off a calendar entry, the practical answer was the open-source homeassistant-volkswagencarnet integration maintained on GitHub under the user robinostlund. evcc, the open-source EV charge controller used to align home charging with solar production, polled the VW backend periodically to read battery state.[7][4]

The API shutdown

On the afternoon of May 27, 2026, every third-party client targeting the Volkswagen Group cloud began failing simultaneously.[1][8] Users reported authentication failures with credentials that had worked the prior day, while the official Volkswagen, Audi & MyŠkoda smartphone apps continued to authenticate normally.[8][2] The integration logs showed unauthorized, forbidden, & bad-request responses against the VW Group token endpoint.[4]

Community analysis of the shipping VW-App build identified the change as a migration of the OIDC token endpoint from /login/v1/idk/token to /auth/v1/idk/oidc/token, combined with a new requirement that the client prove via cryptographic attestation that the request originates from an official VW Group app.[4] Maintainers responded the same day by extracting the attestation parameters from the shipping Volkswagen Android app & restoring access through emulation; fixes shipped within hours as pull requests against evcc & the volkswagencarnet Python package.[4] The change therefore raised the engineering bar for community integrations rather than ending them outright, & continued access depends on maintainers tracking every future VW-App build.

The first public confirmation came from owners filing bug reports against homeassistant-volkswagencarnet on the afternoon of the cutover, then from a separate issue titled "[BUG] VW has disabled access to API, so any services based on it no longer work" opened the same day.[8][2]

Affected integrations & features

The breakage affected every community-developed VW Group tool in active use, including:

  • homeassistant-volkswagencarnet (Home Assistant, Robin Östlund)[8][2]
  • evcc solar-aware EV charge controller[4]
  • homeassistant-myskoda (Škoda)[3]

Functions that stopped working from the owner's smart-home side, even where the official app still showed them, included state-of-charge reporting, charging control, climate pre-conditioning, lock & unlock, & vehicle location.[1][9] Owners who had built automations to charge their EV only against solar surplus, the use case evcc was written for, lost it overnight: without a polled state-of-charge value from the car, the controller could not decide when to start or stop a charging session.[4]

Home Assistant capabilities not available in the official app

The community integrations were not a re-skin of the official Volkswagen app. They exposed each vehicle as a set of writable Home Assistant entities (switches, numbers, selects, device trackers, locks, climate controls) that any automation, dashboard, time-series database, voice assistant, or external script could read and command. The Volkswagen, MyAudi, MyŠkoda & Cupra apps are closed mobile clients with a fixed UI, no documented MQTT, REST, webhook, or local-network egress, no integration with rooftop solar or dynamic electricity tariffs, no calendar, geofence, or weather triggers, and no long-term data export. Many of the headline remote-control features in the official app sit behind the paid We Connect Plus subscription, priced on Volkswagen UK's own services page at £129 per year.[10][11]

Capability Home Assistant integration / evcc Official Volkswagen / MyAudi / MyŠkoda / Cupra app
Charge only on rooftop solar surplus evcc Solar mode starts charging "automatically as soon as the PV system delivers enough power" & continuously adjusts current "so that no power is drawn from the grid if possible"[12] No PV-surplus charging in the app. Volkswagen Group routes this use case to the separately purchased Elli Charger 2 hardware, whose product page states it "uses excess energy from solar power systems to directly charge the EV"[13]
Charge on a dynamic electricity tariff evcc ships native integrations for Tibber, aWATTar, Octopus Energy, ENTSO-E, Energy Charts, Amber Electric, EPEX Predictor & Nordpool, & schedules charging into the cheapest hours[14] No dynamic-tariff awareness in the app; VW's variable-price answer is again the Elli Charger 2 hardware, which "can automatically schedule the cheapest times to charge"[13]
Force a cloud data refresh on demand Force data refresh switch (refresh_data) wakes the cloud poll on command[15] No user-facing refresh control listed on Volkswagen UK's services page[10]
Configurable polling interval per vehicle Scan-interval number entity, default 5 minutes, configurable 0-60 minutes[16][15] No user-controllable polling cadence listed on Volkswagen UK's services page[10]
Read instantaneous charge power in kilowatts Exposes charging power as a sensor with POWER device class[15] A user documenting a Home Assistant dashboard noted that charging power in kilowatts "at the moment it is not possible to obtain from the car infotainment"[17]
Cap AC charging current in amperes select.charge_max_ac_ampere writable to 5, 10, 13, 16 or 32 A[15] No user-selectable AC amperage cap listed on Volkswagen UK's services page[10]
Multiple departure timers with scriptable conditions Three switch.departure_timer{1..3} entities, each settable via the update_schedule service with weekdays, start/end window, & per-timer charging & climatisation flags[18] Scheduled charging exists only as in-app entries; no external automation hooks listed on Volkswagen UK's services page[10]
Pre-condition cabin from weather, calendar or geofence Documented Home Assistant automation triggers cabin pre-heat at 07:00 "when it's freezing outside" (outdoor temperature below 1 °C) via switch.electric_climatisation[19][15] App supports clock-based departure timers only; no trigger on outdoor temperature, calendar event, geofence, or weather forecast listed on Volkswagen UK's services page[10]
User-defined notifications on charge events User automations send notifications such as "car is done charging" with current range, & alerts on charging-error state, via any Home Assistant notifier[19] Push notifications are limited to the app's preset events; no user-defined predicates & no third-party notifier (Pushover, Telegram, ntfy) listed on Volkswagen UK's services page[10]
Multi-vehicle, multi-brand single dashboard Home Assistant aggregates the Volkswagen alongside other brand integrations (Tesla, BMW, heat pumps, solar inverters); the integration "supports Volkswagen Connect vehicles such as the Passat, Golf, e-Golf, Tiguan, ID series, and more" as native devices[16] Apps are brand-siloed: Volkswagen, MyAudi, MyŠkoda & Cupra each ship a separate mobile app, and Volkswagen UK's services page lists no cross-brand or multi-vehicle aggregation feature[10]
Long-term historisation of every reading Home Assistant's built-in Recorder integration "constantly saves data" to a local SQL database for query, retention & export[20] App shows recent trips & charging sessions in-app only; no CSV, JSON or database export documented on Volkswagen UK's services page[10]
Open egress over MQTT for external consumers The companion WeConnect-mqtt library is "MQTT Client that publishes data from Volkswagen WeConnect", exposing vehicle data on MQTT topics that any subscriber can consume[21] No MQTT, REST, webhook or local-network interface listed on Volkswagen UK's services page[10]
Door lock & unlock as an automation primitive lock.door_locked entity, gated by the owner's S-PIN; usable from any Home Assistant automation[15][16] App offers manual lock & unlock from the lock screen only; no scripting or conditional automation listed on Volkswagen UK's services page[10]
Vehicle location as a Home Assistant device_tracker device_tracker.position entity, usable in zones, geofences & presence detection[15] Location is visible in the app but no geofencing, presence, or webhook interface is documented on Volkswagen UK's services page[10]
Voice control through Apple HomeKit All exposed entities are reachable through Home Assistant's voice-assistant bridges; an owner in the integration's community thread documented exposing the Volkswagen integration to HomeKit via a Home Assistant input boolean[19] No Apple HomeKit, Amazon Alexa or Google Home skill for We Connect is listed on Volkswagen UK's services page; voice control is limited to in-car "Hello ID."[22][10]
Free, no-subscription remote charge & climate control Runs against the owner's existing Volkswagen account at no recurring cost[16] Volkswagen UK lists "Extend by 1 year (inc. VAT) £129" for We Connect Plus, following a trial of two to five years depending on model & build date[10][11]

Volkswagen's response

Volkswagen Group did not issue a press release about the change before the German tech press picked it up on May 28-29, 2026.[6][9]

The official explanation surfaced on a private Škoda owners' Facebook group, posted by VW Group Info Services & reposted by users into the public GitHub trackers. It described the change as a "formal framework for third-party access to vehicle data" intended to "make sure these apps work reliably and your data stays protected," & told owners:

"Apps without a formalised relationship with VW Group Info Services will no longer be able to access vehicle data. If you use a third-party app and you are not sure whether it is integrated, the best step is to contact the provider directly and ask them to complete the attestation process with VW Group Info Services."

[3]

The attestation programme is a business-to-business product. In September 2024 VW Group Info Services announced an integration with telematics provider Geotab to surface Volkswagen Group vehicle data for commercial fleet customers.[23] An owner running homeassistant-volkswagencarnet on a home server is not the target customer.

Consumer response

The homeassistant-volkswagencarnet tracker accumulated bug reports from European owners, all reporting identical authentication failures with credentials that still worked in the official app.[8][2]

The evcc maintainers opened a dedicated discussion thread that drew sustained engagement, & explicitly asked participants to keep arguments about suing Volkswagen in a separate thread so the technical work could proceed.[4] Owners across the GitHub threads repeatedly invoked the EU Data Act as the legal basis on which the lockout should be challenged.[4]

Some owners canvassed switching brands. A reader quoted by Mobiflip wrote that if Volkswagen could not offer a workable interface "wie es BMW gemacht hat" ("like BMW has done"), "wird es halt kein VW mehr" ("then it just won't be a VW anymore").[9]

Regulatory context

The EU Data Act (Regulation (EU) 2023/2854) entered into force on January 11, 2024.[24] The majority of its provisions began to apply on September 12, 2025, & design-by-default obligations on connected products & related services offered in the EU follow after September 12, 2026.[24][25] Under Articles 4 & 5 of the regulation, a data holder must, when the user requests it, make readily available data accessible to a designated third party in a structured, commonly used & machine-readable format.[25][24]

Within hours of the cutover, owners on the GitHub trackers argued that a Cariad-issued partner-attestation requirement that excludes free-software clients cannot be reconciled with that Article 4 / Article 5 obligation.[4] No regulator had opened a public proceeding against Volkswagen Group over the API shutdown as of late May 2026.

Pattern of automaker API lockouts

Mazda, Toyota, Stellantis & General Motors have each restricted or monetised owner access to vehicle data in the preceding three years.

  • Mazda sent a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown to GitHub in 2023, forcing the removal of the open-source libraries used by Home Assistant.[26]
  • Toyota moved remote start, remote climate & other Remote Connect functions behind a paid subscription that begins after the included trial period.[27]
  • Stellantis charges $9.99 per month or $109.89 per year for connected navigation across its brands.[27]
  • General Motors announced the removal of Apple CarPlay & Android Auto from future EVs.[27]

In the United States the legal frame around owner access to vehicle data has tilted toward owners. On February 11, 2025, U.S. District Judge Denise Casper dismissed the Alliance for Automotive Innovation's suit challenging the Massachusetts Data Access Law, which was approved by Massachusetts voters in 2020.[28][29]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 "VW und Audi sperren API-Schnittstelle; "Smart-Home-Blackout" seit 27.05.2026 - Teil 1". Borncity. 2026-05-29. Retrieved 2026-05-29.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 "[BUG] VW has disabled access to API, so any services based on it no longer work". GitHub (robinostlund/homeassistant-volkswagencarnet). 2026-05-27. Retrieved 2026-05-29.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 "API access change - VW Group third-party framework". GitHub (skodaconnect/homeassistant-myskoda). 2026-05-26. Retrieved 2026-05-29.
  4. ↑ 4.00 4.01 4.02 4.03 4.04 4.05 4.06 4.07 4.08 4.09 4.10 "VW lock API requests soon and allow only registered Apps #30236". GitHub (evcc-io/evcc). 2026-05-27. Retrieved 2026-05-29.
  5. ↑ "robinostlund/homeassistant-volkswagencarnet (repository description)". GitHub. Retrieved 2026-05-29.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Schmidt, Jörn (2026-05-28). "Heimlicher Stecker gezogen - Warum VW-Fahrer gerade ihr Smart Home verlieren". Schmidtis Blog. Retrieved 2026-05-29.
  7. ↑ "evcc-io/evcc (repository)". GitHub. Retrieved 2026-05-29.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 "[BUG] Login no more possible, Android App still works". GitHub (robinostlund/homeassistant-volkswagencarnet). 2026-05-27. Retrieved 2026-05-29.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 Hesse, René (2026-05-28). "VW-Nutzer verlieren plötzlich wichtige Smart-Home-Funktionen". Mobiflip. Retrieved 2026-05-29.
  10. ↑ 10.00 10.01 10.02 10.03 10.04 10.05 10.06 10.07 10.08 10.09 10.10 10.11 10.12 10.13 "VW Connect ID. - All Services". Volkswagen UK. Retrieved 2026-05-30.
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 "WeConnect Plus app charges - free or not for older cars?". Volkswagen ID.3 Forum. 2025-07-03. Retrieved 2026-05-30.
  12. ↑ "Solar Surplus Charging". evcc documentation. Retrieved 2026-05-30.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 "Volkswagen Group brand Elli launches smart charging product offensive for Europe". Volkswagen Group. Retrieved 2026-05-30.
  14. ↑ "Tariffs & forecasts". evcc documentation. Retrieved 2026-05-30.
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 15.2 15.3 15.4 15.5 15.6 "vw_dashboard.py source (RequestUpdate, Charging, DepartureTimer, BatteryTargetSOC, ScanInterval, ChargeMaxACAmpere, ElectricClimatisation, DoorLock, Position)". GitHub (robinostlund/volkswagencarnet). Retrieved 2026-05-30.
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 16.2 16.3 "Volkswagen Connect for Home Assistant (README)". GitHub (robinostlund/homeassistant-volkswagencarnet). Retrieved 2026-05-30.
  17. ↑ Zanatta, Davide. "Volkswagen WeConnect ID in Home Assistant and Custom Dashboard for ID.3". Retrieved 2026-05-30.
  18. ↑ "services.yaml (update_schedule service)". GitHub (robinostlund/homeassistant-volkswagencarnet). Retrieved 2026-05-30.
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 19.2 "Custom Integration: Volkswagen WeConnect ID (Europe)". Home Assistant Community. Retrieved 2026-05-30.
  20. ↑ "Recorder". Home Assistant. Retrieved 2026-05-30.
  21. ↑ "tillsteinbach/WeConnect-mqtt". GitHub. Retrieved 2026-05-30.
  22. ↑ "We Connect Start". Volkswagen UK. Retrieved 2026-05-30.
  23. ↑ "OEM telematics integration is maximizing EV fleet efficiency and ROI". Electrek. 2025-12-20. Retrieved 2026-05-29.
  24. ↑ 24.0 24.1 24.2 "Key Provisions of the EU Data Act Take Effect". Hunton Andrews Kurth. Retrieved 2026-05-29.
  25. ↑ 25.0 25.1 "EU Data Act: What Businesses Need to Know". Latham & Watkins. Retrieved 2026-05-29.
  26. ↑ "Mazda Slaps Developer With Cease-and-Desist for DIY Smart Home Integration". The Drive. 2023-10-20. Retrieved 2026-05-29.
  27. ↑ 27.0 27.1 27.2 "Buyer Beware: Subscription Fees Are Hidden In Your New Car". Pickup Truck Talk. July 2024. Retrieved 2026-05-29.
  28. ↑ "Auto Care Association Applauds Verdict in Years-Long Massachusetts Right to Repair Battle". Auto Care Association. 2025-02-11. Retrieved 2026-05-29.
  29. ↑ "Massachusetts right-to-repair law upheld as judge dismisses automaker challenge". WBUR. 2025-02-12. Retrieved 2026-05-29.
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