The Crew can now live on thanks to the community, after Ubisoft completely shut it down the The Crew Unlimited project has released to keep it alive.
If you still have a copy somewhere that is, since Ubisoft no longer have a way for new players to legitimately access it. Still, this is an important project for game preservation. Truly is a shame that bigger publishers just decide to dump games like Ubisoft did with The Crew, projects like this show what's possible with a little extra effort. Ubisoft could have clearly done something like this themselves but chose not to.
You can download it from The Crew Unlimited website.
The original shutdown is what led to the Stop Killing Games movement that's continuing its push to get laws amended to hopefully prevent publishers just leaving people with entirely broken games in future. Verification of signatures for the EU campaign is currently underway, and from a Reddit post "early reports from several countries show around 97% of signatures being valid" which is great. They're also continuing to work in the background to counter "misinformation and industry lobbying".
Which is why true offline racing games like Ridge Racer, BurnOut, Split/Second (to name just a few) will always be better being preserved
…this is sarcasm, obviously. It would have been easier. Publishing specs/protocols for this kind of service should be the bare minimum mandatory thing to do at closing time, and I hope the stop killing game initiative move toward this direction. I understand that publishing actual server software and so on might be problematic (licensing, IP protection, etc.) but unlocking clients and providing some docs? Come on. Even if it's an horrible mess (as any project documentation should be hehe), if there's a passionate community around, they'll handle it.