I am also bummed. I've owned Gen's 1-3 and loved having all the data on my driving habits easily accessible on my iPhone. I'm going to miss the auto-trip logging and knowing exactly where and when my car was parked. I guess the Automatic Pro (gen 3 with no monthly fee) was too good to be true considering every single "alternative" I've found seems to have a worse app and even higher monthly fees.
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Automatic Shutting Down and Connected Car Service is Ending on May 28
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Smells fishy. Did they even attempt to chase fleet business to stay afloat? Loans? Incremental layoffs or furloughs?
Just vanish like this? Seems they weren’t trying too hard to identify additional potential customers. Their Twitter account was silent through all this also.
I’m skeptical. There’s something else.
Would be nice if a stable competitor could step in and take over the assets and save the (millions?) of existing adapters from oblivion. Maybe that’s the play here? A rescue Hail Mary?
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This illustrates again how companies produce devices that become obsolete overnight, leaving customers in the cold. Every company should be forced to have a backup plan, to take back all their trash and recycle it before going out of business. There’s enough garbage in the world already.
Very disappointing. I've used the IFTTT service with Automatic to log trips for years. I guess I'm going to try Bouncie as a replacement.
I, too, was an early adopter using it on my Honda Accord and then my Mini Cooper. However, when I bought my Chevy and it came with OnStar, I had no reason to continue using it. OnStar does everything Automatic did and more.
I'd be wary of these types of devices. You provide far too much info about your car and your driving data to these companies. Who is to say they can't turn around and sell this info to insurers (potentially pricing you higher), or using your data against you in a court case ("as you can see, your Honor, he was driving 80 at the time of impact"), etc.
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I look up Bouncie. They have a notice to Automatic users on their front page. I click it. Goes to an insecure (not HTTPS) help article.
Imagine how secure your data is on their servers when they can't even https their help articles.
I think the business model is dying away for this type of product. I believe most of the potential customers also purchase higher end vehicles that include the hardware and have subscription services of their own.
If they have any integrity they should release the ICD and API for people to build apps to work with old hardware.
Early adopter and repeat upgrader. Stopped using them in 2016 when our household went all electric vehicles and sadly they refused to support any electric. I used the data gathered from Automatic to determine that electric cars would meet 93% of our travel needs and that the three long trips we did in a year would still be cheaper when renting a car. In the end the analysis of the Automatic data eliminated the pre purchase range anxiety and now the simple pleasure of all electric driving is it’s greatest gift.
As others have said, I too looked into seriously getting this but held off for a number of design and functionality issues I don’t currently recall.
Certainly helps those in charge save face somewhat. Definitely a good time to go out of business, if you had to pick.
A pointless product that the average Joe never really needed.
As a car enthusiast and coder, I looked at this product years ago. It was basic, clunky and very limited. Nothing more than a gimmick for your average consumer, and difficult to get outside the states.
Dongles like the OBDLink MX+ achieve far more and are a lot more versatile allowing for coding, realtime data, with massive communities backing up the hardware.
Most modern cars have all this information built into their systems already, plus with the advent of Android / Apple integrations, it was killed altogether.
This product was doomed before COVID-19.
For those wanting to track consumption, I suggest the above dongle (OBDLink MX+), and there is plenty of software on the market that will support what you need.
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Just wanted to add, I didn't exactly research this. I pretty much took the first result from Google but it does summarise a few of the available apps. I use Torque a huge amount with my cars.
archer-soft.com
If you have a BMW, I also use a combination of Carly (available for a lot of brands), and BimmerCode.
For more in-depth coding, I use an Ethernet connection for coding through enet, but that's not exactly the option to use while driving!!!
As a car enthusiast and coder, I looked at this product years ago. It was basic, clunky and very limited. Nothing more than a gimmick for your average consumer, and difficult to get outside the states.
Dongles like the OBDLink MX+ achieve far more and are a lot more versatile allowing for coding, realtime data, with massive communities backing up the hardware.
Most modern cars have all this information built into their systems already, plus with the advent of Android / Apple integrations, it was killed altogether.
This product was doomed before COVID-19.
For those wanting to track consumption, I suggest the above dongle (OBDLink MX+), and there is plenty of software on the market that will support what you need.
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Just wanted to add, I didn't exactly research this. I pretty much took the first result from Google but it does summarise a few of the available apps. I use Torque a huge amount with my cars.
resources Archive - Cprime
If you have a BMW, I also use a combination of Carly (available for a lot of brands), and BimmerCode.
For more in-depth coding, I use an Ethernet connection for coding through enet, but that's not exactly the option to use while driving!!!
the problem is also that some consumer electronics companies that are more stable are leading by (bad) example, saying “but look, it works”.
If Apple’s servers shut down all iPhones ever produced couldn’t reinstall their OS anymore because they can’t “authenticate”.
I agree that there should be Always be a fallback option. In order to legally sell a device, there should be a way to use it completely offline or all source-code available to the public.
Agreed
This is just one of the many hardware/Software integration problems.
I bought a Nest before I knew it was owned by Google, Google shut down Api's from Nest last year, this sucks big time, shouldn't be allowed.