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

Thank you for doing that. I really wish they did open source their apps also.

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

Automatic Labs is owned by SiriusXM (market cap $25B).

I was just thinking that Automattic should buy the domain and just point it to theirs. I guess it doesn't matter though, most people don't know what Automattic is, they know what Wordpress is.

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.

I suspect they weren't doing well and are using this as a cover. With many states opening up as we speak, the could have ridden out a small down turn and come out the other end. You might argue that a lot of people are going to be without work and won't be buying new cars in the next while, however, were those their customers in the first place?

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)?

If it had been a "buy the whole package outright, no cloud nonsense" service then having the company go belly up wouldn't render your purchase useless.

Having a subscription means it can disappear on you at any point.

But this subscription business died so doesn't it demonstrate the opposite of what you're saying?

In the good old days, businesses thrived perfectly well off of one-time purchases of products.

They were, SiriusXM acquired them just over three years ago: https://blog.automatic.com/automatic-siriusxm-4dfbc9a6885c

Perhaps there is better datasets for sale.

The added information compared to what Google or Apple are collecting is perhaps ODB metrics, but I'm not sure whether ODB metrics of gaz cars have a lot of value.

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.

There's very little money on the hardware space... plus if you're not charging an ongoing premium it may not be worth it.

What upsets me is seeing this hardware just become e-waste. I really dislike seeing perfectly functional hardware become unusable just because the company folds or something newer comes out. I ranted about the iphone 4 and how it's no longer possible to build software on that platform, especially since it's low power and could be used for any small project. My old Nexus 7 is still kicking (just slooow)

I used to work (sort of) in this space. A lot of the functionality that companies want to tie to their ODB hardware is getting rolled into the cars themselves by the auto manufacturers and app platforms like CarPlay and Android Auto. Companies like this had 5-10 years before facing obsolescence.

Most startups rely on industry growth. If you have 100 drivers today and 110 tomorrow, you will have the climate for startups. If you have 100 drivers today, and 90 tomorrow, you only have room for the entrenched players.

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.

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".

> mask

I see what you did there :D

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

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

I worked at an ultimately unsuccessful IoT startup a few years ago. Our first product was a wireless leak detector with remote notifications, it was definitely better than the what the market currently had on offer but it only "worked" if its base-station could contact a service via the internet. On the software side of the project had a lot of time to think about the long term future while the hardware team was working through manufacturability and so on. Watching other hardware+service companies go under I realized there's a need for some sort of "continued service insurance" in this industry. I'm imagining some company that, for a fee, would take delivery of service software images and guarantee its continued operation for the reasonable life of the hardware (say 5 to 10 years) if the company folds. No improvements/bug fixes/etc., just a guarantee that whatever sort of phoning-home the hardware was doing before could continue after. With no new sales, so no growth to worry about, seems like it should be pretty easy to predict the total cost to run the thing for the promised duration on a cloud service like AWS.

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?

> 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 think that's absolutely great. I've had enough IoT products brick on me that I avoid most out of principle now. I'd change my mind for a product that make it clear they've implemented a customer-friendly plan for when the servers inevitably are shut down.

That said, I think your plan really only seems to help tinkerers. There may be no way around that for what you're building, but I think graceful degradation in functionality is preferable, such as having a maximally-functional no-cloud mode. The few smart products I buy have a mode like that.

You should also consider open sourcing your cloud service in the event of shutdown. A repo with a Dockerfile should be sufficient, that could be turned into Digital Ocean droplet configs and similar one-click launches.

If you're spending a lot of time figuring out how to fail in such a way that your product doesn't become waste, you're probably working on the wrong things.

Perhaps the choices you make and the time you spend on mitigating the possibility of your product becoming e-waste will make you more likely to fail, leading to a higher probability of your product becoming e-waste because most people won't bother re-flashing the hardware you're making.

Work on improving your product and making sure that you succeed.

It’s gotten easier with Home Assistant but still, even as an engineer I prefer to use the easy APIs for these things sometimes than run my own support system for the Z-stuff

Same here, I wouldn't touch wifi-devices unless I there was no other alternative (not been the case yet with the exception of my robot vacuum but it runs on a schedule anyways and I manually trigger it 1-5 times a year). Z-wave all the way. I'm currently a SmartThings user but I'm sort of considering switching to Hubitat. Probably wait till my existing hub dies or ST does something shady/anti-consumer.

They do seem to have an export feature[1]. The dashboard has been "Loading trips..." for minutes to download into a CSV a measly number 2K trips I had.

I'm sorry that people are losing jobs over such closure, but usually the writing is on the wall.

[1]: https://help.automatic.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000599847-Ho...

an ODB port device, which connects with bluetooth to your phone.

It records how gas-efficient your driving is, as well as beeping when you go over 80 mph or have a hard break.

It tried to gamify your driving behavior to be more efficient and safe. And I think it was effective but from the start it's been tied to the cloud.

At the start they'd send weekly reports of driving behavior, congratulating or saying what could be done better. As well as tracking (with location data on the phone) where you drove. I once used it to expense milage for a conference.

However the emails soon stopped coming as frequently or reliably, then a year later when the emails stopped they said they were discontinuing my unit, encouraging me to buy the new one. I did not, as they failed to provide me with the service they promised.

EDIT: to clarify, the phone app would start upon bluetooth connection, and send the data to Automatic. I'm not sure if it was realtime or not.