Smart Driving Assistant ‘Automatic’ Delayed Until August

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Automatic, the California-based startup that turns the iPhone into your own driving assistant, had planned to start shipping preorders this month. Unfortunately, the $70 car dongle + iPhone app won’t be shipping until the end of August now. Automatic needs more time to finish its app before drivers around the country start using it on the road.

An email explaining the delay was recently sent out to preorder customers:

Two months ago, we announced our vision to improve peoples’ relationship to their cars. Since then, we’ve been blown away by the excitement surrounding Automatic and by the volume of pre-orders.

Our small team has been working hard to build a seamless connected car experience that works on thousands of makes and models, and we’ve made tremendous progress. The good news is that the Link – that little device that plugs into your car – is ready and being manufactured! Unfortunately, we underestimated the time needed to complete the iPhone app and we’re sorry to say that it won’t be ready until the end of August.

When we realized we were going to have to push back the date, we started working on a way to get the core of Automatic’s features to you sooner. So here’s our plan: Because you pre-ordered early, we’re making Automatic available to you as a private beta. If you sign up, you’ll elect to receive your Link for use with a beta version of the app, which is stable but lacks a few features like Crash Alert and support for multiple cars and users. We’ll gradually roll out Links to beta users starting in mid-June.

If you’d prefer to get your Link with the feature-complete version of the app in August, you don’t need to do anything. Either way, you won’t be charged until your Link ships.

We’re truly sorry for the delay. Thank you for believing in our mission.

We’ll have a full review of Automatic as soon as we can get our hands on it. In the meantime, you can learn more about the product and place an order on its website.

Source: Automatic

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