June 2026 · Anthony Sogg

Growth Dies at the Hands of Greed

The affordability crisis and the in-car data grab are not two stories. They are one, and the customer experiences them as one event.

Here's some clickbait: what two numbers are causing me existential stress today? Nope, not my blood pressure, though that's climbing too.

The first: the average new-car payment in America crossed $800 a month in early 2026 (JD Power), and one in five new buyers now commits to $1,000 or more (Edmunds), often stretched across an eighty-four-month loan. Layer on the tariff overhang that WardsAuto named a defining force of the 2026 market, and the rocket carrying that monthly figure hasn't flamed out, yet.

The second: the connected-vehicle data business is booming. Analysts size it in the low billions and growing at double digits a year. Location. Driving habits. Feature and app usage. The cabin itself. Everything is monetizable.

Now, read those two points together.

There's a sprint to extract every penny from customers. That's not new.

What is new is the feeling of betrayal when customers get to the end of a "trial period" for features they paid for at the time of signing. Imagine being paywalled while your own usage data is being monetized, either as a product to be sold to another aggregator or as a way to squeeze just a bit more out of you, the customer.

It's no wonder loyalty and lifetime value are sliding. Households earning under $100,000 were half of all new-car buyers in 2020. By 2025 they were down to 37%, according to Cox Automotive data. One of the largest buyer cohorts in history is shrinking, and not because they stopped wanting cars. They got priced out of them.

The customer already answered

Deloitte's 2026 Global Automotive Consumer Study surveyed over 28,500 people across 27 countries, and 62% report that data gathered from synced devices gives them the ick. That's a scientific term.

Another 58% are uneasy about in-cabin camera data, with an equal percentage not thrilled about their vehicle location data being captured. These are not fringe privacy hardliners, like myself.

That's the majority.

Sounds a helluva lot (again, scientific volume metric) like the monetization team is ignoring the Voice of the Customer for short-term share of wallet.

Consent isn't a checkbox you collect once and bank forever. It's a balance, and when that balance comes due, the bill is real. It's paid for in declining loyalty, trust, and customer lifetime value.

Extraction has a tell

I'll lean into the hubris. I've built suppression and consent rules at tens-of-millions-of-records scale, across more privacy regimes than I care to count. The pattern never changes.

Data taken in a moment of trust compounds into value through meaningful personalization.

Data taken without the customer's active, expressed consent compounds into liability.

Now that $800 payment turns into a bigger payment, or stays the same for fewer features than you had when you bought a car you're quietly unsure you can afford.

Buyer's remorse turns to buyer's revenge.

When a customer feels squeezed, every new subscription for what they already had, or every new data request, reads as greedy double jeopardy. The location feature that felt like convenience or a safety feature at $400 a month feels like a combination of corporate surveillance and the car they own being held hostage at $800.

What was used as a unique selling point to get the customer in the door just became a unique "sell-the-car-and-buy-a-competitor's-car" point.

The version that compounds

The companies that get this right don't treat data as a thing to harvest. They treat it as a thing to earn and nourish. And they earn it by making the exchange visible and valuable.

Connected technology and data mining isn't by nature bad. Turning your product into a vehicle for microtransactions (pun so intended) though? My moral compass points in the opposite direction.

My entire career is predicated on finding ways to use that data responsibly and in service of the customer. Responsible data stewardship turns transactions into experiences and one-time buyers into lifetime loyalists. Look no further than American Express.

And let's be real, declining loyalty isn't purely derived from corporate greed. Product commoditization, ample substitutes, completely new business models that make legacy verticals obsolete, and all of our collective knowledge and consciousness at our fingertips makes customers mercurial at best.

It takes more than a good product to create lifetime value. We've entered an era of software-derived life where nearly everything is customizable at scale with the right data.

Customization is differentiation, and lifetime value means differentiating the experience from acquisition to retention, referral to angry customer reviews.

Many would call this personalization. I call it good business. If you can make your product or service feel like it was built solely with each customer in mind, and no one else, that's a loyalty proposition.

I'm not anti-monetization. I'm anti-irresponsible monetization at the expense of long-term strategy. There's real, durable value in vehicle data, and the OEMs that build trustworthy data relationships will own a category the laggards can't fake. Again, my entire career is predicated on the above.

But you can only run the "extract every last penny from the customer" playbook for so long. Eventually you run out of customers to squeeze, and those that are left are gun-shy, terrified that the privilege of unlocking their car is going to require another subscription, and that the data from when they unlocked it, how quickly they opened it, and how forcefully the door was closed will be sold off to some other company that chases them down to sell them sturdier doors for their dog house.

Mavericks in the boardroom see F&I, the vehicle itself, subscriptions, accessories, and warranty as separate events. The customer lives them as a single event. They should be owned as one too.

Take less than you give back, especially from the person who just stretched to afford you. That's not charity. It's the only version of this that survives the next renewal.

Anthony

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