For a new car, the generation of data is as important as the consumption of fuel or electricity. Location, speed, braking, seatbelt use and trip timing, all these data points flow from the vehicle to the manufacturer, and, sometimes, to companies the driver has never heard of.
Connected vehicles create genuine value, from crash response and stolen vehicle recovery to predictive maintenance and usage-based services.
They also make the manufacturer a large-scale data business, and customer preference management, the discipline of capturing and honoring each driver’s choices about their data across every touchpoint, is now as much a part of the product as the infotainment system.
The Vehicle Became a Data Channel
A driver’s relationship with an automotive brand now runs through at least four surfaces:
- The vehicle itself
- The companion app
- The dealership
- A growing set of digital services and subscriptions
Each collects personal data, often under terms presented at different times by different entities.
The result is a consent estate that no single system oversees. A choice made during a dealership handover rarely reaches the app, and a preference set in the app rarely governs what the vehicle transmits, which leaves drivers making choices that the wider ecosystem never hears.
Regulators Are Sweeping the Sector
California’s privacy regulator has been investigating connected vehicle data practices since 2023, and the sweep has produced results.
In March 2025, a major automaker was fined $632,500 after, among other findings, Global Privacy Control (GPC) opt-out signals received from consumers’ browsers were never applied to the accounts of known, logged-in customers.
The finding describes an architecture rather than a mistake. The web consent tool and the customer database were never connected, so the browser said no and the account never heard it.
Any manufacturer running separate consent silos for web, app and vehicle carries the same gap.
Consent Has To Travel With the Driver
European regulators are formalizing the multi-device problem the industry already lives with.
In December 2025, France’s CNIL published recommendations on multi-device consent, allowing a choice made on one device to apply across all devices linked to the same account, but only under strict conditions: Users must be told upfront, and a refusal must apply exactly as broadly as an acceptance.
The automotive translation is direct. A driver’s refusal recorded in the companion app should govern the vehicle’s optional data flows and the dealership’s marketing systems with the same reach that an acceptance would have, and asymmetry in either direction is the pattern regulators have said they will treat as invalid.
The Dealership Is Part of the Data Estate
The dealer network deserves particular attention, because it is where the customer relationship begins and where consent capture is weakest.
Marketing permissions gathered during a sale often live on paper forms or in dealer management systems that never synchronize with the manufacturer’s CRM, and franchise structures blur who is responsible for honoring them.
The driver experiences none of that complexity. They bought one brand, and they expect a choice expressed to the dealer, the app or the call center to hold everywhere, so the consent architecture has to deliver what the org chart obscures.
Location Data Raises the Bar
Vehicle data is dominated by precise geolocation, which sits in the most sensitive category of nearly every modern privacy law.
Maryland, Oregon and Virginia have now banned the sale of precise geolocation data outright, with Virginia’s ban taking effect on July 1, 2026, and further states are considering the same step.
Purpose limitation matters just as much as collection. Data gathered to operate a safety or navigation service carries the driver’s expectations with it, and reusing it for marketing, resale or insurance-adjacent purposes without a fresh, specific consent is where the sector’s largest exposures now sit.
Transparency is Becoming the Differentiator
Drivers rarely read telematics terms, but they notice outcomes, and reporting on vehicle data ending up with data brokers and insurers has made the sector’s practices a mainstream news story.
Manufacturers can respond at the product level by giving drivers a clear, dashboard-accessible view of what the vehicle collects, what is optional, and a preference center that changes it in one place.
Handled that way, data becomes part of the ownership experience rather than a hidden cost of it, and the consented data that remains is the kind the business can build services on without looking over its shoulder.
The Work Before the Trust
The starting point for better data management is a map: Every data flow from the vehicle, app, dealership and service platform to every internal and third-party destination, with the consent or other lawful basis that covers it documented next to each line.
Gaps on that map are tomorrow’s enforcement actions and headlines.
The market is consolidating around unified consent and preference management platforms capable of maintaining a single record for each customer across all those touchpoints, though the responsibility rests with the brand rather than the technology.
Lasting customer relationships in this sector will belong to the manufacturers that treat the driver’s choices as seriously as the driver does.