
Automatic (Car Adapter) Shutting Down - webbdev
https://automatic.com/customerfaq
======
webbdev
I sent an email to their support team asking if they had plans to open source
their apps and they said, "there are no plans".

~~~
kylehotchkiss
What a shame, it was a nice piece of hardware that could have had a few more
years of life.

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blakesterz
I'd imagine that domain name is worth some serious case. Automattic
(WordPress) and many others would probably love to scoop that up. I wonder if
that's their most valuable asset now?

~~~
cocktailpeanuts
Automattic probably derived from "Matt" (The name of the founder) so probably
better to keep using the brand.

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apple4ever
This really sucks. I have two Automatics, and they are just awesome. I've
already used them to diagnose car issues, and tracking is great.

Luckily I got a lot of use out of them, but definitely said to see them go.

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jmount
Whew, not Automattic (WordPress).

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PanMan
I always really liked this approach: Instead of every car smart by replacing
them, make dumb cars (a bit) smarter with a connected device. Even once
pitched a competitor to this service. That said, I'm wondering what the impact
of Covid was on this: A regular SAAS service shouldn't see a huge impact, or
would all customers cancel when not using their car for a month?

~~~
throwanem
I've been thinking for a while now that we could expect to see a lot of
"incredible journeys" for which COVID-19 is both the stated reason, and a very
useful cover for the true causes. Not speculating on whether this is one of
those, but I'll admit I wouldn't be astonished if it were.

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willswire
Wow. This is hard to believe. Big-time Automatic user - have been for about 6
years. The crash-alert feature provides peace of mind in a somewhat older
vehicle. If anyone else knows an alternative, please share!

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webbdev
It's hard to believe they weren't acquired. The amount of driving data they
have must be huge.

~~~
CrazedGeek
They were, SiriusXM acquired them just over three years ago:
[https://blog.automatic.com/automatic-
siriusxm-4dfbc9a6885c](https://blog.automatic.com/automatic-
siriusxm-4dfbc9a6885c)

~~~
toomuchtodo
SiriusXM not shutting down yet?

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TylerE
Highly unlikely. The big money sink is already spent (launching the
satelites).

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runako
The satellites are likely much cheaper than the ongoing costs for content.

It looks like they are spending over $2B annually on content fees. They could
launch a lot of satellites with $2B per year.

~~~
toomuchtodo
SpaceX should strike a deal with Spotify (StarLink “Constellation” as a
competitor to SiriusXM)!

~~~
gremlinsinc
Why would spotify even need spacex? I mean... it's just the internet...they
already have access to that, and so does everyone else. 4g connectivity to
your car is probably simple and could be done if needed or a lot of people
just link their phone to the radio.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Just as XM has use case specific hardware just for audio in cars and semi
trucks, you’d need a StarLink terminal to get just audio content over
StarLink’s constellation. Hence, a deal with a content provider (Tesla did
this with Slacker radio in their cars).

Not every vehicle might need or want a full blown satellite ground terminal
that can provide IP service.

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kirillzubovsky
Perhaps next time someone on HN is complaining about "yet another
subscription" business, send them to this and 10k other posts as a reminder
how good businesses die without proper revenue.

~~~
ianwalter
Couldn't that go both ways though? Why would I want to sign up for "yet
another subscription" when they can just go belly up and render my investment
worthless (vs an alternative with a one-time payment)?

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ricardobeat
> With fewer consumers purchasing and leasing vehicles and drivers on the
> road, we unfortunately do not see a path forward for our business.

Said like nobody will ever drive cars again.

I'm perplexed at how quickly these businesses are deciding to fold.

~~~
vondur
I think it's a cop out. Sirius XM purchased them and then pivoted to rental
car fleets. Guess that didn't work out, so blaming the Covid economy is an
easy way out.

~~~
apple4ever
I was nervous Sirius would shut them down. Guess my worry was not misplaced.

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Kikawala
The adapter may still function over Bluetooth to read SAE PID [1] data using
OBD Fusion[1] or a similar app.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OBD-
II_PIDs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OBD-II_PIDs)

[2] [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/obd-
fusion/id650684932](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/obd-fusion/id650684932)

~~~
jdminhbg
According to their App Store description:

> We no longer recommend using the Automatic car adapter due to reliability
> issues.

Do you happen to know if this is real or just a CYA? I'd pay $10 to extend the
life of my adapter, but not if I needed to buy another device anyway.

~~~
mrlambchop
Former VP Eng @ Automatic here :( There is an auth component needed for that
BT connectivity to work - once the token expires, the BT connection won't
authenticate anymore.

i.e. if you uninstall the BT apps, change phone etc...

~~~
Terretta
Why wouldn't you have pushed an update that removed the DRM?

~~~
floatingatoll
"Former"

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cordite
They made my unit end of life, and then found themselves at end of life.

This is IoT.

~~~
rohansingh
I'm working on a IoT device and this is something that my cofounders and I
have discussed a fair bit. While we want to succeed, we know that most
businesses fail, and we don't want to put out products that become waste.

We're working on mitigating this by having an open hardware platform. The idea
being that, even if our cloud service isn't up, you can re-flash the hardware
to do anything you want. And you can use our documentation to do it so you
don't have to reverse-engineer everything from scratch.

I'd like to see more companies follow this approach. I've at least a handful
of IoT devices that are effectively bricked, which sucks because I know they
have decent and usable innards.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
Do you think that Automatic needed to have a cloud service? Their primary use
case seems to have been uploading mileage data to a variety of expense
reporting systems. I don't see any reason that has to go from the OBDII dongle
through the now-discontinued Automatic servers, and only then pass to the
actual endpoint.

These IoT devices (and especially the phones and PCs that typically act as
intermediaries) are abundantly capable of storing the configuration data and
doing the API calls necessary to communicate with online services.

Is it just about the control?

~~~
rohansingh
It's probably more about control than cost. Our company's product is similar
to Automatic's, in that, in theory, you could have everything be done on-
device and not need a proprietary backend at all.

Other than the fact that this is difficult to keep up-to-date and working, it
increases the hardware cost significantly. Instead of having a very cheap
microcontroller handling everything, you might need something more capable and
more expensive.

Development cost goes up too, since instead of writing your integrations in
Python, Go, JS, or whatever, you need to write your integrations on your
embedded system.

~~~
battery_cowboy
There are a lot of really nice frameworks, like elixir with nerves, which make
iot development a breeze. I'm sure it's not a pancea, but it's easier than
coding in C or something like that for your firmware. With nerves, you can
write your backend and firmware in the same language (elixir) and you don't
need to worry too much about embedded things like memory insufficiency since
nerves handles it all. I'm sure there are cases where you _have to_ use a low
level language, but those will decrease over time as hardware gets better and
more efficient.

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RubenvanE
Wow, the service stops on May 28th, less than a month away.

Just out of curiosity, have there been more (relatively successful) companies
with a paid subscription plan that announced that they would, within a couple
of weeks, shut their services down? As an outsider it seems quite drastic to
me, given that the daily costs of keeping the servers running a bit longer is
negligible.

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nradov
Just buy the Torque Pro app for $5 and buy a cheap OBD2 Bluetooth adapter to
go with it. No subscription needed.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.prowl.torq...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.prowl.torque)

~~~
floatingatoll
That only replaces the "vehicle data inspection" use cases, not the other use
cases such as "call me when my vehicle is crashed by my kid".

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nickthemagicman
I wonder how many companies are going to be claiming covid related issues to
mask other deeper issues.

~~~
baggachipz
> mask

I see what you did there :D

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joelgarzatx
Would be great to get an export that preserves the image of the trip map
showing the path, even as a zipped folder full of thumbnails. Now do I write a
script to scrape a screen shot of the 1700 trips, or write some code to use
the exported encoded polyline (lose brake/mph/accel data on map)?

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jabberwik
Anyone know a good alternative to this that isn't meant to be fleet-scale?
Getting OBD data over Bluetooth is widespread enough, but their service also
made it super easy to generate mileage expenses. Also downloading a CSV of all
my trips made for some fun data crunching. I'd love to keep those things going
even if it means self-hosting something.

~~~
sahaskatta
What cars do you have? I'm the founder of Smartcar.com and we might be able to
help. No OBD devices needed.

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MK_Dev
I have an older unsupported device still connected to my car. Any open source
ideas for it?

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atonse
I haven't read the article but I wonder how GeoTab worked into this (for the
small fleet customers, large fleets would never consider this product)

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cameldrv
This sucks. I use Automatic to track business miles. Is there a good
alternative that's not phone based?

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vorpalhex
I panicked thinking this was the company behind Wordpress. It's not, it's just
a car assistant thing.

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JackPo
Anyone have an alternative that they use for GPS tracking? I have 3 of these,
argh.

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whalesalad
If anyone has a device they’d like to sell, please contact me (in bio).

[EDIT] Thank you to the wonderful hackers who reached out to me. I think that
I am all set now.

~~~
mrlambchop
If you manage to hack this, let me know (retiring VP Eng here)! The latest
device contains a custom ASIC with hardware security :)

~~~
borgel
Wow, an ASIC is a big step! I'm impressed you needed to hit that level of
(cost down, I assume?). Or was it to get better HW security, perhaps to use it
for billing?

Anyway, I had an original Bluetooth Automatic until I upgraded to a Pro when
it was launched. I love them! Sorry to hear this is the end.

~~~
mrlambchop
Vehicle compatibility was really the key - building a cross bar that allowed
any pin to be mapped for any function (i.e. CAN on any combo of pins). We
included a hardware protocol decoder and a ton of electrical safety items as
well as security and reliability tools. 200MHz processor, 2MB flash and 256kB
of ram in a single QFN package. A great project to work on! One career
highlight for sure.

~~~
borgel
Ahh, interesting. I can see how that combination of features would be easier
to fit in an ASIC than as discreet components in the tiny dongle. Pretty cool
hardware combination!

Can you comment on what the safety/security/reliability blocks were?

~~~
mrlambchop
A couple of examples of hard problems might be the best approach.

\- loss of ground

A vehicle OBD connector can at times, loose its GND pin. There are actually
two GND pins - chassis and electrical that can sometimes disagree. Its
possible for one of either of them to either (a) loose connectivity (b) bias
towards the signal level or head towards a negative signal level (-2v was our
typical observation).

To prevent an OBD protocol pin from dumping current down the channel, a
complex HW/SW solution is needed to monitor and react quickly to prevent
downstream ECUs from being fried.

\- security

We built a custom debug tool based on CM-DAP (ARM debugger technology) that
included OOB security paths to unlock a device for re-flashing / debugging. I
think we made 500-1k of these in total for manufacturing/RMA/logistic
purposes. This was super fun to work on :)

