They’ve been doing a pretty good job this year of focusing on quality of life and ease of use, so there’s hope

Actually… https://github.com/frenck/home-assistant-doom

Every HACS integration can be installed manually by downloading the repo and copying the folder into your instance. HACS is really just a convenience tool

I don’t know how well this translates to Europe, but I’ve been pretty happy with Ford. The remote stuff is free and there’s a HACS extension with a lot of controls available.