But it's quite easy to set timers to attempt things at regular intervals, rather than in an infinite loop until they succeed.

One attempt every 5 seconds (assuming a 5-second timeout for the request) is 17,280 attempts a day. One attempt every 5 minutes is 288 attempts a day. One attempt every 15 minutes is 96 attempts a day.

A simple repeating timer is a fantastic solution.

Does the car need to always send telemetry immediately? Can there be a 15-minute latency? If so, just put that on a timer and enjoy 99.4% power savings for offline cars, with basically the same quality of telemetry when they're online.

But what if a car needs to send telemetry at a given moment? Just move up the next timer function call.

But what if I want to get telemetry when the 3G signal is intermittent and briefly available? Just call the function once the 3G signal is available. Do this with a separate cool-down for this behavior.

But what if I need telemetry every second? Just dump all telemetry events into a buffer between successful sends, slap a timestamp on those events, and you can now send data for the past X hours all at once. Even from the black spots.

There are so many options (even less fancy than exp back-off), but this was probably built by a junior programmer without any support network. This feels like a very common lack-of-experience mistake that would be caught in code review if the reviewer cared.