Automatic: Your Smart Driving Assistant

I have OnStar for similar reasons -- primarily as a safety device -- however it retains three rather large benefits-

1) OnStar is a hardened part of the vehicle, built specifically to endure a high speed collision. Someone's smartphone in the center console would likely be ejected or demolished by the same.

2) The two way voice phase before initiating emergency services gives comfort that there aren't false emergency calls that can get you in legal or financial troubles.

3) Via the antenna on the car (raised, on the outside of the vehicle, large), I can confidently say that OnStar has given me connectivity in many cases where my smartphone has none.

I'm not trying to be an ad for OnStar, but based upon those facts I can't make the economic decision that this is a replacement for that. For someone who doesn't have OnStar as an option this would likely be fine, but just thought it was worth mentioning that.

More: What is my gas mileage? How long can I go without refilling (can I make it to my destination)? How has my (friend/significant other/child) been driving when they're in my car? What can I do to be improving my driving habits or fuel economy? How far did I drive and what did it cost me (anyone who travels for work)?

They lost me by making on the iPhone first......

Android should have been the first device they released it for.

I wonder if it's possible to set a different emergency number instead of 911? Emergency services use 112 in Europe.

This is a great start to what I hope will be an awesome product. One of the other commenters mentioned fleet/enterprise customers -- let me raise my hand (as one of those customers) and say how SORELY needed this sort of approach to tech is in the fleet space.

I actually predict (hope?) this will take off more on the business side than the consumer side. Here's the problem:

Fleet managers (that is, people who are responsible for keeping track of/maintaining large numbers of vehicles used by a company) need a simple way of doing three things:

1. Locating their vehicles.

2. Getting data about their vehicles

3. Changing settings on their vehicles (i.e. lock/unlock, etc.)

That's really basically it. And you would be surprised how totally awful the existing solutions are for doing even two of them (most focus on #1). 3 is a bit more difficult as not everything can be done through the OBD port, but many things can.

There are, literally, a hundred different companies that sell products that do the first - usually in the form of a hidden box that has a GPS antenna and a (really crappy and expensive) cellular modem that pings a really expensive service via GPRS or some similar out-of-date tech and costs $30/month/device for service + $500 / device. It's absurd.

What every fleet manager actually wants: The Automatic device w/ mobile data transmission ability (i.e. not tethered to an iPhone). Let me a) see where my car(s) are, b) get telemetry from the OBD port, and c) interact with the car in whatever fashion is possible via the OBD port.

I know that's a 2nd gen product that I'm proposing - and I think these guys are smart to start with something that tethers to a consumer phone for data. But produce this product for a reasonable price and there are literally hundreds of thousands (millions?) of fleet vehicles on the road that will scoop 'em up.

And I think the use case is stronger for an enterprise product. I hear fleet managers (and myself) asking for this product every day. I don't hear consumers saying "damn, I wish I knew how efficient my braking was."

Anyway, the tl;dr is: Awesome. Eager. Good Luck!