I got this message from Automatic today:
Like many other companies in the United States, the COVID-19 pandemic has adversely impacted our business, and we have made the difficult decision to discontinue the Automatic connected car product, service, and platform. This decision to cease operations affects all Automatic services, including our automatic crash notification service. We will be shutting down all operations at 11:59 pm, PT, on May 28, 2020 and, as a result, your Automatic service will end on that time.
I was disappointed when the company cut off my old Automatic adapter and tried to get me to āupgradeā to a new one with a subscription model. My other car had a newer adapter with built in cell coverage and no subscription and that was niceā¦but I had noticed that some features had stopped working in the last year or so.
Automatic WAS a great piece of tech that was handy to have in the car to be able to see where the car was driven (which was fun to have to look at my cross-country driveā¦or when I had to give the car to a valet driver at a hotel near Disneyland), but also handy to see what āCheck Engineā messages really were.
I see they were bought by SiriusXM. Not sure when that happened, but somehow I suspect thatās when things started to go downhill.