Is your car the next iPhone?

If automakers come through on their promises to electrify their lineups and create “software-defined” vehicles, one of the models they’re designing now could make our current vehicles look like landlines—or maybe Nokia cellphones.  

Today we spend much of our downtime scrolling our phones, generating data that tech giants like Google and Apple can monetize—including the time we spend sitting in the car. 

Now that newer cars are equipped to get software updates remotely, automakers want to make money off the data sitting in our biggest devices, too. 

Stellantis is aiming to make €20 billion in incremental annual revenue from software services and subscriptions by 2030, while General Motors is anticipating annual software and services revenue of between US$20 billion to US$25 billion by the end of the decade.

McKinsey & Company estimates that by 2030, about 95 per cent of new vehicles globally will be “connected,” up from around 50 per cent at the time.