Volvo Engine Sensor Missing In Home Assistant?

Are you a Volvo owner who loves integrating your car with Home Assistant? If so, you might have noticed something a bit off after switching to the official Home Assistant core Volvo integration. Many users, myself included, have found that a crucial sensor – the one indicating whether the engine is running – seems to have vanished. This might sound like a minor inconvenience, but for those of us who relied on this sensor to automate tasks like ensuring the car is locked after a certain period, it’s a significant loss. I recently made the move from the custom thomasddn/ha-volvo-cars integration to the officially supported one in Home Assistant core, hoping for a more streamlined experience. While the official integration is generally fantastic and brings a wealth of features, the absence of this specific engine status sensor is a real head-scratcher. I’ve checked the official documentation, and unless I’m missing something subtle, it doesn’t seem to be readily available. This leaves us wondering: is this a known issue, a change in how the integration works, or something else entirely? Let's dive into what might be happening and explore potential solutions or workarounds.

Understanding the Volvo Integration in Home Assistant

The official Volvo integration for Home Assistant aims to provide a robust and reliable way to connect your Volvo vehicle to your smart home ecosystem. This integration allows you to monitor various aspects of your car, such as its location, charging status (for electric and hybrid models), and other relevant data points. Previously, users often relied on community-developed custom components, like the one by thomasddn, to achieve this level of integration. However, as Home Assistant matures, the goal is to bring popular and well-supported integrations directly into the core system, ensuring better maintenance, faster updates, and a more consistent user experience across the board. This transition is generally a positive step, as it means the integration is maintained by the Home Assistant team and benefits from a broader testing base. The official integration typically exposes a range of sensors and services that can be used to create powerful automations. For instance, you can get notifications when your car's battery is full, track its mileage, or even pre-condition the cabin temperature. The expectation with such integrations is that they cover the most common and useful data points from the connected service. The engine status sensor, in particular, is a fundamental piece of information for many car-related automations. Knowing whether the engine is on or off can trigger a cascade of actions. Think about arriving home and wanting your garage door to close automatically once the engine is turned off, or ensuring that your car is locked after you've left it running for a short while. Without this direct feed of information, these types of logical automations become significantly more complex, often requiring workarounds that are less elegant and potentially less reliable. The move to the official integration should ideally simplify these processes, not complicate them. The fact that this specific sensor is missing is therefore quite puzzling and has understandably caused concern among users who have built their automations around it. We'll explore why this might be the case and what we can do about it.

The Missing Engine Status Sensor: A Closer Look

The core of the issue lies in the disappearance of the engine status sensor after migrating to the official Home Assistant Volvo integration. In the previous custom integration, this sensor provided a clear signal – usually a binary state (on/off) or a more descriptive status – indicating whether the vehicle's engine was currently running. This seemingly simple piece of data was instrumental for setting up automations that relied on the car's operational state. For example, a common use case was an automation that would automatically lock the car doors a few minutes after the engine was turned off. Another might be to trigger a