Your car's touchscreen is no longer just a map and a stereo. Automakers now see it as unclaimed advertising real estate, sitting in front of a captive driver for an average commute of nearly an hour a day. But the same connectivity that makes in-car ads possible is the connectivity that just got General Motors a 20-year federal consent order over how it collected and sold driver data. The advertising opportunity and the privacy backlash are the same story, playing out at the same time.
The pivot to advertising is a direct response to a cost problem. Connected vehicle subscriptions generate revenue, but industry reporting notes they barely offset the cost of keeping a car connected, pushing automakers to look at the touchscreen itself as a monetizable surface. According to reporting from Sherwood News, connected screens are now present in 97% of new cars sold worldwide, giving automakers a built-in, always-on display they did not have a decade ago. The same reporting cites the Center of Automotive Management, a German research institute, which estimates in-car e-commerce revenue could reach $100 to $120 per vehicle per year by 2030, creating an addressable market north of $50 billion.
Some of that shift is already visible on the road. Ford has patented a system that would listen to in-cabin conversations to serve contextually relevant ads, according to Sherwood's reporting, while drivers of vehicles like the Jeep Grand Cherokee have already reported receiving marketing notifications directly on their dashboard displays. German platform 4screen, which now partners with 16 vehicle brands including Stellantis, Toyota, Volkswagen, and Mercedes-Benz, has built its business specifically around inserting map-based promotions, such as a nearby coffee shop suggestion, into infotainment systems across a dozen countries.
Targeted in-car advertising only works because vehicles already collect an extraordinary amount of behavioral data. The Mozilla Foundation's 2023 research assessed the privacy policies of 25 major automakers and found that every single one failed its baseline privacy tests, with some manufacturers' policies permitting collection of data as personal as immigration status, genetic information, and sexual activity, according to reporting on the study. Mozilla's lead researcher, Jen Caltrider, has said automakers are 'taking all the information they collect on you' and 'using it to make inferences about who you are,' extending well beyond the driving-safety purposes most consumers assume the data is for.
That collection has already produced regulatory consequences. January 2025, the Federal Trade Commission formally accused General Motors and OnStar of using a misleading enrollment process to sign consumers up for the OnStar Smart Driver feature, which the agency said collected precise geolocation and driving-behavior data as often as every three seconds and sold it to consumer reporting agencies without adequate consent. The FTC finalized its order in January 2026, permanently banning GM from certain data-sharing practices, imposing a 20-year requirement that GM obtain affirmative express consent before collecting or sharing connected-vehicle data, and mandating that GM let all U.S. consumers access, delete, and opt out of their data. Separately, California's attorney general alleged GM earned roughly $20 million selling OnStar data to LexisNexis Risk Solutions and Verisk Analytics between 2020 and 2024, and GM paid $12.75 million in civil penalties to resolve the state's claims, according to reporting on the settlement.
Where OnStar-style data collection was framed as a safety or insurance feature, in-car advertising introduces a commercial use case that consumers did not necessarily agree to when they bought the car. Deloitte's research on connected-vehicle data monetization found that only 31% of U.S. consumers say they trust their automaker most to secure the data their car generates, while an equally large share say they trust no one at all. The same research found that roughly two-thirds of drivers had declined to use a connected app or service specifically because of concerns about how their personal information would be handled, a pattern that suggests advertising-funded infotainment could face real adoption resistance if automakers don't address trust directly.
McKinsey's automotive practice has separately flagged that building consumer trust is now the binding constraint on car-data monetization generally, not the technology. In a survey of auto executives, McKinsey found that 84% considered building that consumer trust a highly relevant challenge for monetizing car data, yet only half believed their own organization was actually prepared to address it, a gap that maps directly onto advertising, arguably the most consumer-visible and trust-sensitive of all the monetization paths automakers are pursuing.
Beyond GM, the legal exposure is spreading across the industry. A class action lawsuit filed in Texas in April 2025 alleged that a telemetry device in Toyota vehicles tracked not only location, speed, and braking behavior but also image and voice data, which was then sold to marketing agencies and law enforcement without owner consent, according to a summary of the filing. Hyundai and Kia both face a separate class action, filed in August 2024, over similar data-sharing allegations tied to their BlueLink and Connect platforms. Texas has also opened investigations into Ford, Hyundai, Toyota, and Fiat Chrysler over data practices, signaling that state attorneys general, not just the FTC, are now an active enforcement front for connected-car data. For automakers weighing whether to build out advertising as a genuine revenue line, the message from regulators and litigants alike is the same: the data pipe that makes targeted ads possible is the exact pipe currently under legal scrutiny, and any ad business built on top of it will inherit that risk.