Build Apps for Cars on the New Automatic Developer Platform (opens in new tab)

I also have a 1st Gen Automatic that I got with the launch/pre-order. Same issues! I have a 2nd one I ordered last year for our other car ... same problem there.

It mostly just won't connect, seems far worse with the iPhone 6 than it was with the 5S. I tried Automatic Support, but didn't get very far beyond "iOS is killing the app due to memory".

When it works it's great! I'm also skeptical about buying a 2nd gen. Would love this to work properly!

I'm sorry you did not have a great experience with our first gen device. We're announcing the second generation device today with the developer platform. The connectivity issues some of our users experienced with the first gen device were mainly due to BTLE. The second gen device has MFi support which allows us to support classic Bluetooth with iPhones. It's much more reliable. You must have received an email with a discount code. I hope you try it. We're also happy to help you get to the bottom of your issues if you write to support@automatic.com.

Completely agree. Why would you trust these guys again? I won't. I didn't sign up to be a system administrator for my truck, and they see no problem with shipping hardware that can't do the ONE THING that they claim to sell it for. Track trips - maybe!

I had the exact same problems. It simply didn't want to connect to my android devices half the time. There was no point in collecting all that data if half of it was missing. Was thoroughly disappointed with that pre-order.

I bought the first one as well. Huge waste, since it was not clear when I bought it that it wouldn't support my VW TDI (Diesel) engine.

edit: just got the email about supporting my TDI a few minutes ago

That sucks yours didn't work out, but I just want to contrast the others here to say that my Automatic worked (and works) great in both my 2000 Honda Accord and my VW Jetta.

I've had a few minor connection issues, but over all it's been very solid when connected to my iPhones.

It definitely helped me adjust my driving habits.

From what I gather, it's a bluetooth device that you plug into your cars OBD-II port. That transmits data from your car to your smart phone. Your phone, then, transmits the data to automatic.

So, you can look at daily gas mileage stats, error codes, and things like that. I assume the GPS parts come from the phone itself (while in the car).

The idea sounds interesting but I wouldn't want the data to be transmitted to the cloud. I'd also be worried that the data might be permissible in court if you were in an accident, for example. As a result, they might see that you were going 10 over at the time of the accident or that you had been doing so 2 minutes down the road. Lots of invalid conclusions can be made on such data and I wouldn't want to share it.

It's something which plugs into the CAN port of your car and sends the diagnostic data from there to your phone.

Seemed pretty straightforward to read to me

Hi TeeWEE, imagine if every car had an API that you could build apps for and drivers could give you access to the data via OAuth. That's basically what the developer platform lets you do. We have a REST API, real-time events via webhooks / websockets and a direct Bluetooth API to the car for mobile clients to access data from the CAN bus directly.

Progressive Insurance offers a similar product, but the way the collected data is used isn't precisely defined. For example, it may try to raise your insurance premium if you exceed the speed limit, even though you're keeping pace with traffic flow (a common situation in the US).

Ok i found that this is just the developer portal for www.automatic.com.

Yup, here's what I did with Torque http://ryancompton.net/2015/02/28/mpg/

Does torque give an api to access that data?

You're absolutely right that there is a lot more information in cars than we expose right now. What we're announcing today is the first step. The goal is to continue to expose more and more data over time via simple to use APIs.

The last thing we wanted to do was build hardware! But, we could not deliver the experience we wanted to without building it. This blog post describes some of the reasons we built hardware - http://blog.automatic.com/why-we-built-the-link/

If you want to learn more about the latest generation hardware - https://www.automatic.com/adapter/

We store the data in Apache Spark using Databricks and Spark Streaming. We are working on a bunch of really cool aggregate analysis that we plan to surface in the app. Things like how does my car perform vs cars in my same class.

https://spark-summit.org/east-2015/talk/spark-plugs-into-you...

We have to be really careful about user's privacy, so we haven't released much yet other than our dashboard: https://dashboard.automatic.com, but I think we'll be able to start pushing insights directly into the app in the next release.

Best Regards, Rob Ferguson Director of Engineering Automatic Labs https://twitter.com/RobFergusonIII

Data logging software has been around for a long time that does exactly that. Some quick searching for your car should turn up some results.

We've started accepting international pre-orders today!

The real question, given your reaction, is why you'd want to build software for a closed platform?