Is Carwings glitchy for you?

[ChrisBriley]

Seems to be fixed here. This evening I've updated about once an hour and it has worked every time without timing out. (still pretty slow though). Tomorrow morning will be the test to see if the cc will activate from my Iphone.

Chris in Maine.

 

[philipscoggins]

It updated for me once at work, but failed once.

The BIG deal is that it let me turn on the heater from my phone while shopping! That never seems to work!

Do any of the second party Android apps work better (more reliable) than carwings?

Philip

 

[FalconFour]

It updated for me once at work, but failed once.

The BIG deal is that it let me turn on the heater from my phone while shopping! That never seems to work!

Do any of the second party Android apps work better (more reliable) than carwings?

Philip

There's no way outside of Nissan's CARWINGS service to communicate with the car - on that side, it's a closed infrastructure. The only way to talk to the car is through Nissan's systems, even using a third party app. So the other apps (I've used "LEAF Control Centre" in the Play Store, as well as LEAF Link on iOS) just send commands to Nissan's systems the same way Nissan's official LEAF app does - the developers either reverse-engineered the protocol Nissan uses for sending CARWINGS commands, or there's documentation for it somewhere, but either way they don't communicate with the car directly. They rely on the same servers that all three of Nissan's own methods (web, Android, iOS) use - and that was the system that's caused all our grief, hence why all methods of communication were affected the same way.

Otherwise, cars would be open to "attack" by third parties (e.g. an ex :lol: ) remote-starting your climate control 'til the battery was dead while you're at work or something. Security *is* somewhat important even with a system that just acts like a big "on/off" switch

 

[philipscoggins]

Thanks, I'll stick with the "Official" app then.

I'm running on Droid Razr and the app never crashes, just doesn't connect as often as I expect with my super fancy high tech wiz-bang car.

Yeah, I could see an EX (or 2) laughing as they turn on the heater during the day & stop charging at night... Might be funny if I wasn't the one with the electric car

Philip

 

[lkkms2]

Was able to log in finally. Updated the status and it showed that the Leaf was charging and the updated estimated range based on the current charge. Good

I usually just start the cc, but will try the timer this morning.

 

[ksnogas2112]

Request updates worked 2x of 2 tries this morning from android phone and 1 for 1 via web just a minute ago.

 

[TaylorSFGuy]

I too agree that things are working better. However, why didn't Nissan notice all the repeated failures themselves and fix it without us bitching about it? Isn't somebody watching the house? It took days, not hours from the time it started acting up until it was fixed. Will they pay any closer attention once they have an opportunity to sell us the Carwings service?

This "service" has been around for nearly 2 years and it still has problems on a regular basis. Do the Ford or Tesla systems have these same troubles? Is Carwings something "good enough" that Nissan doesn't feel they have to improve it or even monitor what is happening? Why does the website take so many times to update the rankings - it seems like the results are built with each request and just like sending requests to the car, the website seems to get overloaded and fail. If data is reported to Nissan realtime why are the results only updated once a day?

I have gone from likely being one of LEAF's strongest supporters to one of the many disenchanted owners and for those of you that have looked at my posts, you have probably seen this developing over time. Will more voices be raised when the mileage on odometers start to rise? Nissan - I need more capacity and I don't want to buy a another car to get it.

 

[grommet]

Official statement from this morning:

"UPDATE for Nissan LEAF Owners: CARWINGS Restored

Code and configuration updates have sucessfully returned LEAF CARWINGS service connectivity to normal and we have seen no issue recurrence over the last 14 hours. Customers should be able to use all services normally. Our technical teams will continue to closely monitor systems and service performance to ensure you are able to fully enjoy all your CARWINGS services, and we will continue to troubleshoot and work to improve our service performance and stability. Thank you all for your patience and feedback. We apologize for an inconvenience this may have caused you.

- Nissan Social + Nissan Vehicle Connected Services"

Good the world didn't end.

 

[philipscoggins]

Working great for me! I just bought my LEAF a little over a month ago. It worked great the first week and has gotten progressively worse, great to see it back up!

Philip

 

[lukati]

Worked fine this morning. No issues.

 

[ttweed]

I'm running stock 4.1.1 on a Samsung GNex, and several other users with the same phone report it doesn't work. 4.1 is Jellybean, different release than 4.0 (Jellybean vs Ice Cream Sandwich). The phones would not connect at all, maybe the login problems you refer to. I had then when I first got the phone last December, then they weren't fixed for months, then they were, then when the OS was updated it stopped working according to others, so I am 2 updates behind on the Nissan app.

I just used the official Android app from Nissan on my Nexus 7 running stock Jellybean 4.2.1 and it logged in and updated status just fine. My wife is out in the car right now so I couldn't test the CC command. The Play store does not show the Nissan app as compatible with my device, but a helpful MNL member sent me the app and I sideloaded it, and it seems to work fine on the Nexus 7 running Jellybean, though I don't often use it.

Using my Win 7 laptop this morning, going to the owners portal in Firefox as I usually do, I was able to log in and update status fine on the first attempt, taking about 20-30 seconds to respond, but once again it displayed CC as running already, even though I hadn't asked it to turn on. Checking the garage, the car was not preheating as the Nissan site indicated it was. I'm not sure what would happen if I clicked to turn the CC off and then tried to restart it, but I'll try that next. I'll also try the Nexus 7 app tomorrow morning and see if it works for remote CC.

TT

 

[ksnogas2112]

As a software support geek I can understand it taking a long time to actually find the problem and fix it.

However, as a software support geek I can say that with a proper change control process the ability to roll back to old code/database/process is vital. I've had production environments passing hundreds of thousands of invoices a day down because of a code bug but instead of rolling back they left it in until they found the fix. That was usually 2-7 days. This is all at my last job not my current one. That was the same team that shell script deleted the oracle /bin directory...twice. It was so bad towards the end that customers were expecting a 1 week outage every time we released a code update.

So I get it. I don't like it. I don't think it's a good way to do business. I don't think the original communication out from Nissan regarding the problem was appropriate. It's not that hard to put in error checking and provide more than a 404 page not found. Or even at least a 404 page not found for an app.

 

[Nubo]

I too agree that things are working better. However, why didn't Nissan notice all the repeated failures themselves and fix it without us bitching about it? Isn't somebody watching the house?

Not sure how closely. For example, per Carwings the "World Eco Trees" for NA and Japan basically flatlined beginning January 2012, while the number for Europe has increased about 6-fold since then.

 

[stevewa]

I noticed the service started working last night, and I received a call from Nissan this morning confirming the service had been restored and checking to make sure I was having success with it.

 

[SalisburySam]

Ditto to stevewa...I just got my call from Nissan CustSvc to close out my trouble ticket. Told me there was a major server issue (duh) that has been resolved and indeed I can get to CARWINGS from all iPhones/iPads/computers now as before the problem.

 

[ttweed]

Everything is working normally for me now, too.

TT

 

[FalconFour]

Amusing.

I just tried turning climate control on and I got the same error as usual:

climate control on failed
Your request to start climate control for Leaf failed. There was a problem detected communicating with the vehicle. Please try your request again. Also ensure your vehicle is located in an area with cellular reception and it has been driven with the last 14 days.

This comes right on the tail of reading Nissan's latest response:

UPDATE for Nissan LEAF Owners: CARWINGS Restored
Code and configuration updates have sucessfully returned LEAF CARWINGS service connectivity to normal and we have seen no issue recurrence over the last 14 hours. Customers should be able to use all services normally. Our technical teams will continue to closely monitor systems and service performance to ensure you are able to fully enjoy all your CARWINGS services, and we will continue to troubleshoot and work to improve our service performance and stability. Thank you all for your patience and feedback. We apologize for an inconvenience this may have caused you.
- Nissan Social + Nissan Vehicle Connected Services

I'll give it another try, but this is "1 of 1" failure rate so far...

edit: OK, it worked when I refreshed it, then tried CC on, then CC off. Maybe it was just a one-off, but now I'm down to 25% fail rate and dropping. I'd call that a success.
edit: One more success!

 

[mhigley]

Back on in Kansas.

 

[Randmac]

still much more glitchy than usual for me.

 

[DNAinaGoodWay]

When my Carwings went down a couple days ago, I just switched over to using Leaflink and Greencharge which both worked fine. Greencharge is the only one that reliably notifies me if unplugged or when charge ends, and I like the SOC badge. Haven't even bothered to log into Carwings again.