Phone App: How/Why does "Unlock" work immediately but car still takes forever to wake up?

[Yonki]

Forgive me if this has been covered before. Sometimes when I want to do something from the app, I get "Waking Up" for as long as a minute (or longer). But if I press "unlock" the car unlocks immediately - clearly the phone and at least some significant part of the car is communicating. But even after a successful (instant) unlock, I often still see "Waking Up" for a minute or so.

What part of the car is still "waking up" and what takes so long? It seems like if the car is awake enough to unlock, it should also be awake enough to activate Homelink or enable the start of Summon.

 

[Petrlol]

Unlock is using Bluetooth via a close proximity.

Unlock won't be instant if you try it from >40ft or so. It will have to use LTE

Everything else is using the LTE connection which isn't always online when the car is asleep.

 

[Msjulie]

Also 'waking up' is the phone app talking to the server, server pinging the car to say 'hey' and it takes a few for the car to respond to the ping and report back it's status

Bluetooth is local and less power hungry than pushing data on that cell link

I believe the LTE is always live like any other cell modem but the car's systems don't waste bandwidth/power to keep updating the server when the car is idle <- this is how I would build it anyway...

 

[Yonki]

Thanks, that's all informative & helpful. So next question is why doesn't the car leap to attention (full LTE connection/awareness) if it's unlocked via Bluretooth? 95+% of the time the owner is about to get in the car after an unlock.

It's a little like Apple's Find My (Friends). It can take 30-60 seconds for it to find a friend. Which makes no sense because Messaging is almost instantaneous (so it's not a phone to phone connection issue), and my (and my friends') phone usually knows my exact location at all times, so why does FMF take so long? My best guess is it's some sort of anti-stalking / real-time following measure. Which is fine, but can't the first ping be quick?

 

[drtimhill]

Thanks, that's all informative & helpful. So next question is why doesn't the car leap to attention (full LTE connection/awareness) if it's unlocked via Bluretooth? 95+% of the time the owner is about to get in the car after an unlock.

It's a little like Apple's Find My (Friends). It can take 30-60 seconds for it to find a friend. Which makes no sense because Messaging is almost instantaneous (so it's not a phone to phone connection issue), and my (and my friends') phone usually knows my exact location at all times, so why does FMF take so long? My best guess is it's some sort of anti-stalking / real-time following measure. Which is fine, but can't the first ping be quick?

It's basically the trade-off between responsiveness and battery drain. You COULD have fast responses, but battery drain would be crazy (and the network would be stressed too). It sounds a simple problem but there are lots of practical issues. For example, getting a GPS fix is quite expensive power-wise and takes longer than you might expect. There are also no particularly good mechanisms for asking a phone/car to do something; you really have to wait for the device to wake up and ping the central server from time to time (not always, but for many tasks). And the more frequently they ping, the more loaded the network infrastructure and the more your battery drains.