The once-hopeful dream of car makers to persuade customers to pay for subscriptions to useful technology is being dashed by a combination of consumer reluctance, technology democratisation and cut-throat competition for business.
Enthusiasm for what could have been a promising new revenue stream for car makers has been dampened by a series of negative reaction from customers asked to pay to unlock technology already fitted to their car – most recently Volkswagen’s £16.50-a-month power upgrade for electric models already homologated for the higher power band.
“We haven't yet seen mass take-up. Consumers don't seem to like it very much,” Andrew Bergbaum, global automotive leader at consultant AlixPartners, told Autocar. “People wonder when they’re paying Y thousand a month for a vehicle why they should spend more for the same hardware they’ve paid for.”
The consumer negativity has shown up in the latest S&P Connected Car survey, which records attitudes to features unlocked via the car itself.
The number of respondents globally who said they’d be willing to pay for connected services including advanced connectivity, better navigation or higher-tech active safety functions has “significantly decreased” from 86% in 2024 to 68% in 2025, the consultancy said.
Meanwhile, those who said they paid for no services at all actually increased by 5%, a surprising shift given car makers are launching more connected cars. “Subscription-based services [navigation, wi-fi etc] are increasingly being met with resistance from price-sensitive consumers,” wrote Vivek Beriwal, principal analyst for automotive technologies at S&P Global.
Not so long ago, car makers were convinced that software was going to unlock a gold mine of payments. For example, Stellantis said back in 2021 as part of its Dare Forward plan that it intended to grow annual software revenues to €20 billion by 2030. The company has since rowed back on many of the Dare Forward promises, such as scrapping the plan for level-three eyes-off driving autonomy by 2026.
Unlocking different levels of autonomy was going to be a key part of the plan get customers to pay more. For example, you might have bought a day’s worth of level-three autonomy for a long journey.
But as the difficulties of autonomy become increasingly apparent, car makers are realising that software alone isn’t going to create the more premium levels of assistance that customers might pay extra for. For the extra assistance, you need extra hardware, which brings us back to the problem that people won’t want to pay to unlock features that already sit on the car.
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