By not giving consumers control over performance and maintenance data collected by their cars, manufacturers can limit where cars are repaired and serviced
Vehicles collect a lot of unusual data. But who owns it? — Mr. Hanvey is president and chief executive officer of the Auto Care Association. Tweets: @privacyproject , @nytimes , and @jathansadowski Tweets: @privacyproject : Your driving habits — how fast you drive, how hard you brake, whether you always use your seatbelt — could be valuable to insurance companies. But while you can turn off location data on your phone, there's no opt-out feature for your car. https://www.nytimes.com/... @nytimes : In Opinion Bill Hanvey writes, “Connect a phone to a car, and it knows who we call and who we text. But who owns and, ultimately, controls that data? And what are carmakers doing with it? The issue of ownership is murky.” https://www.nytimes.com/... Jathan Sadowski / @jathansadowski : “Modern cars collect as much as 25 gigabytes of data per hour and it's about much more than performance and maintenance.” It gets pretty personal. And that data is extremely valuable to manufacturers—and to third-parties buying the data like insurers. https://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Writing for the NYT's privacy project, Auto Care Association chief Bill Hanvey makes the repair-industry's core complaint: cars now generate driving and maintenance data with no opt-out, and by keeping owners locked out of it, manufacturers decide where a car can be serviced. Jathan Sadowski's framing in the same piece — that 'smart tech' marketing hides the politics of who controls the data — turns a mechanic's grievance into a data-ownership question.
The op-ed reads as early warning for what later coverage documented: a connected vehicle data marketplace of dozens of largely unregulated brokers, and automakers like GM, Honda, Kia, and Hyundai adding driving-score app features that feed brokers such as LexisNexis. Hanvey's repair-access argument and the insurers'-data story are two ends of the same control point.
First-order effects
- Independent repair shops — the Auto Care Association's constituency — lose access to the performance and maintenance data needed to compete with dealer service departments, steering owners back to franchised dealers.
- Consumers get no opt-out equivalent to a phone's location toggle: driving habits, braking, and seatbelt use flow to the manufacturer by default.
Second-order effects
- With manufacturers as gatekeepers, the same data pipeline extends beyond repairs to pricing — insurers can tap driving-behavior data, a path Consumer Reports flagged with mobility-analytics startups raising rates based on where and how people drive.
- The aftermarket and repair industry is pushed toward legislative right-to-repair fixes, since voluntary data sharing from automakers is not forthcoming.
Third-order effects
- If manufacturers retain exclusive control, vehicle service consolidates around dealer networks while the data itself becomes a sellable product — an unregulated marketplace sitting between drivers, insurers, and shops.
- Data ownership, not mechanical skill, becomes the fault line in auto repair: whoever holds the gateway to vehicle data (a question the industry's shift past the aging CAN standard only sharpens) decides the shape of the service market.
The trend: Vehicle data is shifting from a repair-access dispute into an unregulated marketplace, with manufacturers as paid gatekeepers between drivers, insurers, and independent shops.