Automatic

» see automatic.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Every car built since the mid-nineties has a diagnostic port under the dashboard that mechanics plug a reader into. Automatic Labs, founded in San Francisco in 2011 by Thejo Kote and Jerry Jariyasunant, built a small adapter that lived in that port permanently and talked to your phone. It logged every trip, scored how hard you braked, translated the check-engine light into a sentence instead of a code, remembered where you parked, and if the accelerometer registered a crash it could call for help on your behalf.

It sold through Best Buy and the Apple Store for around a hundred dollars, and the later Automatic Pro carried its own cellular radio so the phone did not have to be present. There was a developer platform behind it, a set of partner apps and a Log in with Automatic button, which meant mileage trackers and expense tools could read your driving without rebuilding the hardware layer.

SiriusXM bought the company in April 2017 for a reported hundred and fifteen million dollars, wanting the connected-car platform rather than the gadget. In 2019 support ended for the first two generations of adapter, which annoyed the owners of hardware that was five years old and still physically fine. On 1 May 2020 the rest of it was given a date: everything would keep working until the end of 28 May, and then stop. The company's statement said the pandemic had adversely impacted the business. Third-party apps and the login service were given until the end of June.

~ the chronicle ~

~ twenty seven days ~

A shutdown notice for a cloud service is an inconvenience. A shutdown notice for a thing you own, bolted into your car, is a different sentence, and the gap between announcement and execution was under four weeks. Automatic offered rebates to a limited set of customers and told everyone else to recycle the adapter, because once the servers were gone the device had no local mode to fall back to. Nothing about the hardware had failed. The trip history lived on somebody else's machine and so did the parsing of the diagnostic codes, and both went at the same moment.

This is the recurring bill on connected hardware, and the model's defenders are usually right that it is what makes the product cheap in the first place. The owners who had just bought a Pro in early 2020 were the ones who paid it.

~ two Ts ~

Type automatic.com today and you land on automattic.com, with two Ts. That is the company behind WordPress, an unrelated business that now owns the shorter spelling. A connected-car platform that once had shelf space in Apple stores is a redirect into a blogging company one letter away.

~ the category never came here ~

OBD-II in Turkey stayed where it started, as a tool in the hands of the person fixing your car, and the consumer version of it never arrived. Part of that is the crash-response feature, which only means anything if the company has an arrangement with the emergency services in your country, and Automatic's arrangements were American. Part of it is that the insurance discounts and mileage deductions that justified the hundred dollars were American too.

The version of this product that reached me was the complaining, in the weeks after the notice went up in May 2020.

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