A new self-driving car company was recently spun out from an online education startup company, and it is using a .Auto domain name for its website. The company is called Voyage, and it is using the Voyage.Auto domain name. Voyage.Auto was registered this past February.
I read about the startup on Techmeme, which shared articles published on Business Insider and TechCrunch. Here’s an excerpt of what Business Insider wrote about the startup:
“The self-driving car company will join a crowded market filled with heavyweights such as Google, Tesla, and Uber. Voyage will focus on creating a fleet of self-driving taxis using retrofitted mass-production automobiles rather than building and selling its own autonomous car.”
One thing you will notice is that the logo does not contain any hint that the company uses a .Auto domain name extension. In fact, if you looked at it without knowing anything about the brand, you likely would have no idea it was even a car-related company.
At the time of publication, there are 406 .Auto domain names registered, according to nTLDStats.com. The low number of registrations could be due to the high cost of registering a .Auto domain name. 101Domain, for example, charges $2,699.99 to register a .Auto domain name, and other domain registrars charge high prices as well (Uniregistry charges $2,888.88 for comparison purposes). Interestingly, VoyageAuto.com was registered in 2012 and currently resolves to a GoDaddy landing page.
Perhaps it is a sign of the times, but neither article I read about the startup even mentioned that the company is using a .Auto domain name. I am not sure if that is because the writers expect people to understand this or if they simply do not think it is notable. As a domain industry blog publisher, I think it is notable.
Odd, you would think that somebody (Consultant, owner, CMO, Brand manager, etc.) would have informed them that it would be wise to brand with the extension to avoid confusion. To each their own I guess.
This is the type of company that wants to be known as “Voyage”. The last thing they want is someone to call them “voyage auto” or whatever, that is as clunky as it gets.
A rebrand in the making, what’s new?
They’ll go bust well before that.
I see VoyageAuto.com resolving to a Uniregistry page not a GoDaddy page.
That appears to be a recent change. On 4/5/17, the nameservers were:
Name Server: NS51.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
Name Server: NS52.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
https://research.domaintools.com/research/whois-history/search/?q=voyageauto.com&date=2017-04-05&origin=permalink
VoyageAuto.com owner got lucky. It’s just a matter of time.
I like the logo, reflecting the “V” as an “A”.
Yes, they ought to have bought VoyageAuto.com too. Oh, well. They still will. They’ll just pay more.