The Car That Watches You Back

On the morning of November 24, 2025, automotive journalist Zerin Dube opened the door of his Jeep Grand Cherokee, settled into the driver’s seat, and pressed the start button. The dashboard came up. The infotainment screen ran its boot animation, blinked to the home view, and then loaded an advertisement on top of the home view. Not a service reminder, not a recall notice. A promotional offer: $1,500 in Loyalty Retail Bonus Cash toward the purchase of a new Jeep, timed to appear at startup, configured to linger for fifteen seconds, and programmed to return at the next ignition cycle if he failed to dismiss it quickly enough.He photographed the screen and posted it to X. The caption: “Late stage capitalism popping up on our Grand Cherokee.” Zerin Dube's photograph of the startup ad, posted to X on November 24, 2025. The photograph captured something people had been watching develop in fragments (a feature added here, a terms-of-service update there) but hadn’t yet seen stated plainly. Dube’s Jeep had not been hacked. Nothing had gone wrong. The advertisement came from Stellantis, the company that built the truck, over the truck’s own cellular connection, to a screen in a vehicle the owner had paid for outright.To turn it off permanently, Stellantis directed owners to call the Brand Connect customer service line at 800-777-3600 during business hours.This is a story about how a machine most people still think of as property became something else: a platform with monetized inventory and a data feed pointed back at the manufacturer. It is also about the sequence of technical decisions that made that transformation possible. The story starts, depending on where you draw the line, either in 1986 with a nine-inch Buick touchscreen, or in 2012 with a Tesla that changed everything, or in the 1990s when engineers began replacing steel cables with electronic signals and nobody outside the industry particularly noticed.Forty Years of Glass The 1986 Buick Riviera. The first production car with a touchscreen. The 1986 Buick Riviera arrived in showrooms carrying what GM called the Graphic Control Center: a nine-inch cathode-ray tube touchscreen managing 91 vehicle functions without conventional switches or knobs.

It beeped audibly with each touch. Drivers complained it was distracting to navigate at speed. It was dropped after two model years. GM's Graphic Control Center. Ninety-one functions, one CRT, an audible beep on every press. It survived two model years. The concept spent the next fifteen years in development. Lexus introduced a touch-operated navigation system in the 2001 LS430 that was functional and cautious. BMW installed iDrive in the 2002 7 Series: an 8.8-inch display controlled by a single rotary knob that replaced most of the center console controls. Drivers trying to adjust the climate control while moving found themselves drilling through nested menus with a dial. BMW relented and added physical shortcuts after two years of customer complaints. iDrive survived its early reputation and eventually became one of the better systems in the industry, but the lesson (that removing buttons is not the same thing as improving control) did not travel as widely as it should have.The decisive break came in 2012. Tesla began deliveries of the Model S with a 17-inch portrait-orientation touchscreen at its center, running a full web browser, integrated with Google Maps, and controlling virtually every function in the car: climate, suspension, sunroof, charging settings, media, navigation. There was a steering wheel with shortcut keys, window switches, a hazard light button, and a glove box release. Everything else was the screen.Safety researchers pointed to Fitts’s Law, the principle that acquiring a touch target requires visual confirmation in a way that a physical knob with a learned position does not, and published studies showing that touchscreen-heavy interfaces increased cognitive load. The studies were accurate. The market did not care. Within a decade, a 12-inch screen was unremarkable. Mercedes-Benz developed the Hyperscreen, a 56-inch curved display spanning the full width of the EQS dashboard with three screens beneath a single piece of Gorilla Glass. The Jeep Grand Wagoneer shipped with seven screens. The Mercedes-Benz Hyperscreen. Three displays, fifty-six inches, one piece of Gorilla Glass. This proliferation of screens has a useful parallel in consumer electronics.

We have previously noted that Anker added a small OLED display to its Nano 45W charger, a screen that tells you in real time how many watts your phone is drawing, which your phone is already displaying six inches away. The automotive version of this logic produced instrument clusters that display your speed digitally while an analog speedometer sits alongside it, and eventually produced dashboards where a screen replaces the climate knobs, the audio controls, the seat heater buttons, and the parking brake switch, each function now two or three taps into a sub-menu. The screen was not added because it made these things easier. The screen was added because a screen is what modern things look like, and because once installed, it could be updated remotely and eventually monetized.From Cables to CodeThe touchscreen is the visible part of a deeper transformation: the systematic replacement of the car’s mechanical connections with electronic ones.Until the late 1980s, the relationship between a driver’s inputs and a car’s physical systems was largely direct. Pressing the accelerator pulled a steel cable that opened the throttle body. Turning the steering wheel rotated a column connected mechanically to the front wheels. The brake pedal pushed hydraulic fluid through lines to calipers at each corner. Driver intention was transmitted by force.Drive by wire began replacing the accelerator cable in production vehicles in the early 1990s. Instead of a physical cable, a sensor reads pedal position and reports it to an engine control unit, which commands the throttle electronically. The advantages were real: the ECU could coordinate throttle position with fuel injection, transmission shift points, traction control, and stability management in ways a cable could never accommodate. By the 2000s, electronic throttle control was standard across virtually the entire industry. The physical cable between the pedal and the engine was gone.Steering followed. Hydraulic power steering (an engine-driven pump moving fluid to assist the driver) was replaced by electric power steering, which uses a motor on the rack instead. Most electric power steering systems still retain a mechanical column: turn the wheel and the wheels follow through a physical connection. Steer-by-wire eliminates even that. Infiniti introduced a production steer-by-wire system in 2013, retaining a mechanical fallback. In a full steer-by-wire vehicle, the steering wheel is a sensor and the wheels are moved by actuators. The driver’s input is a signal, not a force.

Others faced battery replacement bills exceeding $15,000.BMW’s heated seat subscription, eighteen dollars a month to operate warming elements already wired into the car, is the same logic applied more visibly. BMW eventually withdrew the program in most markets after the backlash, but the withdrawal did not change the underlying architecture. The seat hardware is still in the car, and the software still controls whether it works.Polestar sells a 68-horsepower performance upgrade as an OTA download. The question of whether a manufacturer can alter a product’s capabilities after sale via software has not been definitively resolved legally. In practice, the terms of service accepted at purchase typically grant broad rights over software modifications. You bought the hardware. They retained control of what it does.This pattern of products that continue to require your compliance after you’ve paid for them, that collect telemetry, that require an account, that update overnight and behave differently in the morning, is not exclusive to cars. We have covered it in the Theragun, which now connects to your wearables and tracks recovery sessions, and in the Ember mug, which refuses to heat your coffee until it finishes a 40MB firmware update. Then there’s the Mill compost bin, which costs $999 and reports your food scraps to a cloud. The car is the largest and most consequential version of a phenomenon already well underway in the kitchen, the bathroom, and the gym bag. Everything is becoming a subscription with telemetry, and the vehicle is merely the highest-stakes implementation of that design philosophy.The Attack SurfaceIn July 2015, security researchers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek sat in an office in St. Louis and remotely accessed a 2014 Jeep Cherokee being driven by journalist Andy Greenberg on a highway. Through a vulnerability in the Uconnect infotainment system, and from there to the CAN bus, they commanded the air conditioning, the radio, the windshield wipers, and the transmission. They cut the engine at highway speed and disabled the brakes in a parking lot.Chrysler recalled 1.4 million vehicles. The demonstration made a point that has only grown more relevant: the infotainment system’s cellular connection is a path to vehicle systems that were never designed to receive commands from outside.