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Comment by TeeWEE | Hacker News Reader

I'm browsing this website for 5 minutes, and still dont fully understand what they offer. Do they offer an api to get data of their own drivers on the road? Or do they offer an api to get data of any car out there? Or do they have a box you need to install in your car, which has a built in rest api to get the data you need? I think the initial value this company provides should be more clear on the landing page.

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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.

Ah indeed. Good point about privacy. Also they are not available in Europe.

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).

I actually participated in the program a couple of years ago. You used it for 6 months and it monitored your driving looking for things like rapid acceleration/deceleration -- I assume that's what leads to most accidents. It also tracked time of day as an indicator of how risky you are to insure. When I used it, it was only used to discount your insurance if you were a good driver by their metrics, not increase any premiums.

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

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