Automakers are well aware of the revenue potential of connected vehicle services, but many still haven’t worked out how to make them pay. With nearly 90% of new vehicles globally projected to be connected by 2031 — nearly double today’s share — the value of connected vehicle analytics has become central to understanding how drivers engage with services across the full customer lifecycle.
The problem is most evident for sales and marketing teams, but the onus doesn’t rest solely with them. The issue is visibility. The moments that determine connected service revenue are rarely reported. They happen weeks before any dashboard refreshes or quarterly review lands on a desk. They happen in the first days after a vehicle is delivered, when a driver decides whether to activate a connected feature, and later when they decide whether to keep paying for it or recommend it to others.
If automakers want to grow connected service revenue, they need a bird’s-eye view of how customers are engaging with them, from activation through to renewal.
In our latest eBook, we explain how automakers can arm their sales and marketing teams with the connected vehicle analytics they need to engage customers and drive recurring revenue from connected services.
Why The Old Commercial Playbook No Longer Works
Historically, the automotive industry saw the sale as the finish line. Once a car left the lot, the sales team’s job was done, and they could focus on the next sale.
Today, it’s a different story, thanks to the rise of connected services.
OEM revenue now hinges on what happens after the sale, which means sales and marketing teams must own a customer journey that stretches far beyond the showroom or dealer handover.
But most are still running on systems built for the old model. Marketing platforms capture email opens, click-throughs, and digital engagement, but not whether those interactions led to service activation. Sales tools record purchase intent and demo attendance, but not the features a driver actually uses after delivery. Product and telematics systems track vehicle and in-app usage, but that data rarely reaches commercial teams. Dealer management systems log handover activity but sit outside the marketing and analytics stack.
What this tells us is that automakers are not lacking data — they are struggling with automotive data management and the ability to unify insights across systems.
Berg Insight expects telematics subscriptions to grow from 287 million active subscriptions today to 528 million by 2029. If automakers stick with this fragmented approach, they will struggle to capture their share of that growth.
Blind Spots in Connected Vehicle Data Analytics Are Costing Millions
There’s a common theme across OEMs: teams execute well individually but fall short of commercial goals.
The root cause is structural. Analytics silos mean cause and effect across the customer journey are never connected. By the time revenue is measured, the decision has already been made, and the opportunity to influence it has passed.
This plays out in three ways:
- Sales tells the wrong story: Without visibility into feature usage and telematics data, sales teams default to generic pitches. A regional sales director walking into a fleet tender has no data to back up their claims, so the pitch falls flat. The insight exists, but they just can’t see it.
- Marketing optimises for the wrong metric: Teams optimise for the wrong metrics instead of focusing on paid activation and connected car monetisation performance.
- Leadership cannot diagnose underperformance: They see subscription rates and churn figures, but not why they are moving. Are drivers cancelling because of onboarding friction? Is the feature irrelevant? Or is it priced poorly? Without a unified OEM analytics platform, decisions are made on instinct rather than evidence.
Why Connected Car Monetisation Depends on Better Analytics
Fragmented analytics used to be manageable. Connected services were not yet a permanent fixture in the vehicle proposition. A poor onboarding experience in one market could be fixed slowly, without significant commercial consequences.
That’s no longer the case.
Feature launches now scale globally, so poor onboarding affects every driver. Onboarding friction means missed activation — and once customers have formed an opinion, it is difficult to win them back. Small drops in activation scale quickly turn into significant revenue losses over time.
That’s why commercial teams need a more joined-up approach. They need to connect isolated touchpoints across the full customer journey. And that requires an analytics layer that brings together service activation, feature usage data, driver engagement signals, dealer handover activity, marketing touchpoints, and commercial outcomes such as subscription status, renewal, upsells, and lifetime value by market.
Explore3 by Cubic3 is an AI-powered analytics platform that brings these data streams together into a single, reliable view. By integrating connectivity quality and usage data with internal sales and marketing data, teams can see where momentum builds, stalls, and breaks — broken down by vehicle line, market, driver segment, and time.
Connected Vehicle Analytics Across the Full Customer Lifecycle
The shift from a one-time vehicle sale to a recurring revenue model changes what commercial teams need from their data. Activation rates matter, but so do the signals that predict whether a driver will renew or cancel weeks before that decision lands in a report.
Software-defined vehicles generate the data that makes this visibility possible. The challenge is not collection — it is connecting those signals to the commercial teams who can act on them before the moment has passed. That is what separates an OEM that grows connected service revenue from one that measures it after the fact.
As explored in our post on cloud platforms for connected cars, the infrastructure that consolidates vehicle data at scale is what makes fleet-wide analytics operationally viable. And as covered in our post on SDV cloud integration, the data layer underpinning connected service delivery is most effective when it is designed into the programme architecture from the outset — not bolted on after commercial teams identify the gap.
Frequently Asked Questions: Connected Vehicle Analytics
What is connected vehicle analytics?
Connected vehicle analytics is the capability to collect, unify and interpret data generated by connected vehicles and their drivers. This includes covering service activation, feature usage, network performance, subscription status and commercial outcomes, to support operational and commercial decision-making across the full customer lifecycle.
Why do OEMs struggle to convert connected vehicle data into revenue?
The most common reason is fragmentation. Marketing, sales, telematics and dealer management systems each hold part of the customer journey but rarely share data in a way that gives commercial teams a unified view. By the time subscription rates and churn figures appear in a report, the opportunity to influence the outcome has already passed. Connected vehicle analytics closes that gap by bringing the relevant signals together before the decision is made.
What is the difference between telematics data and connected vehicle analytics?
Telematics data covers vehicle and network performance, ranging from location, connectivity quality, software version, and usage logs. Connected vehicle analytics goes further, combining telematics with commercial data such as activation rates, subscription status, renewal signals, marketing touchpoints and dealer handover activity — to give OEM sales and marketing teams a view of the full customer journey rather than the vehicle in isolation.
How does connected vehicle analytics support subscription renewal?
Renewal decisions are made by drivers long before they appear in a commercial report. Connected vehicle analytics surfaces the engagement signals like feature usage patterns, activation completeness, in-vehicle commerce activity — that indicate whether a driver is likely to renew or cancel. With that visibility, commercial teams can intervene at the right moment rather than responding to churn after the fact.
What role does Explore3 play in connected vehicle analytics?
Explore3 is Cubic3’s AI-powered connected vehicle analytics platform. It integrates connectivity quality and usage data with internal sales and marketing data to give OEM commercial teams a unified view of performance — broken down by vehicle line, market, driver segment and time. It is designed to surface where connected service revenue is being won or lost, and to give teams the visibility to act on that before opportunities pass.
How does connected vehicle analytics relate to automotive data management?
Connected vehicle analytics depends on effective automotive data management – the infrastructure that collects, stores and processes vehicle data at scale. Without a unified data layer, analytics remains fragmented across systems. When automotive data management is designed for the specific demands of connected vehicle programmes, connected vehicle analytics becomes the commercial capability built on top of it.
