Almost every new car now leaves the factory with its own mobile connection, and the Swedish research firm Berg Insight expects that fleet to grow by more than 70% within five years. In its latest forecast, released in July, Berg puts the number of cars on the road with embedded OEM telematics, meaning a cellular modem and SIM that the carmaker fits and runs, at 338 million at the end of 2025, rising to 583.1 million by 2030, an average growth rate of 11.5% a year.
The share of new cars that ship connected keeps climbing too, because Berg estimates that 83% of the cars built worldwide in 2025, about 72.6 million vehicles, came with embedded telematics, and it expects that share to reach 91% by 2030. A year earlier, the firm put the 2024 figure at 79%, with Europe close to 100%, helped by its eCall emergency call rules, North America at about 93% and China at about 84%.
The cars also use more data each year, and Berg expects average data use per connected car to rise from 6.2 GB in 2025 to 10.1 GB in 2030, as software updates, navigation, streaming and driver assistance features lean harder on the network.
Why Carmakers Give The Connection Away
Those numbers point to a shift that matters more than the headline, because carmakers now treat the connection as something to keep switched on at almost any cost. Martin Cederqvist, a senior analyst at Berg, said carmakers increasingly bundle core connected services free for long periods, a move that builds loyalty and, crucially, keeps each car reporting data back to its maker.
General Motors shows where that strategy leads, since it now includes eight years of OnStar connectivity as standard on model-year 2025 and newer vehicles. OnStar brought in about US$800 million in revenue in the second quarter of 2026, up 20% on a year earlier. GM also held US$6.3 billion of deferred OnStar revenue, according to GM Authority's report on the company's results, money that customers have paid upfront for services the company will deliver over the coming years.
That model only works if the car stays online long after the first owner drives it away, and GM expects OnStar to earn more than US$3 billion this year. Paul Jacobson, GM's chief financial officer, said that growth "provides the foundation for everything else we are building," which for GM includes paid driver assistance through Super Cruise and over-the-air updates to about 22 million connected vehicles.
Regulators Are Following The Data
Every one of those always-on cars produces a stream of location and driving data, and regulators on both sides of the Atlantic have started to decide who may use it. In the US, the Federal Trade Commission finalised an order against GM and OnStar in January 2026 after alleging that the company collected precise location and driving behaviour data through its Smart Driver feature and sold it to third parties without clear consent.
The order bars GM from sharing that data with consumer reporting agencies, the firms that feed information to insurers, for five years. It also requires GM to get explicit consent before it collects or shares connected vehicle data, and to let drivers request copies of their data, ask for its deletion and switch off precise location tracking.
Europe Opens The Data To Others
Europe has taken a different route, one that took effect only this month. Under the EU Data Act, cars placed on the European market from 12 September 2026 must let their users reach the data the vehicle generates in a structured, machine-readable format, and owners can pass that data to third parties such as independent repairers, insurers and fleet managers, according to the European Commission's guidance on vehicle data.
That cuts against the business model GM has built, because a carmaker that gives its connection away to collect data may now have to share much of that data with rivals for services such as repair and insurance. The two regimes point the same way, though: the car's connection is becoming shared infrastructure rather than a private channel back to the factory.
A Security Line Through The Supply Chain
The US has added a third kind of rule, one about who builds the connection itself. The Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security has banned Chinese and Russian software that lets a car communicate with the outside world from model year 2027, and the matching hardware, including telematics units and cellular modems, a few model years later. The rule forces carmakers selling in the US to trace where every connectivity component comes from.
The Plumbing Behind 580 Million Cars
Keeping hundreds of millions of cars connected for a decade or more also raises a practical problem that has little to do with regulators. A car sold today may still run in the late 2030s, long after operators retire the networks it launched on, a mismatch we explored in a billion connected cars and LTE's ticking clock.
Carmakers are answering with SIMs that can change operator over the air. In March 2026, Rivian said its R2 would launch with an eSIM built to SGP.32, the GSMA standard for managing connected devices remotely, supplied by Giesecke+Devrient with AT&T as the first US network, so that Rivian can ship one hardware version worldwide and switch networks as it enters new markets. SGP.32, 5G RedCap, a lower-cost form of 5G for simpler devices, and satellite links all feature in Berg's latest outlook for the next round of car telematics.
Those choices land with a familiar set of suppliers, since Berg lists AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Orange and Telenor among the operators that connect carmakers' fleets, and Cisco, Aeris, Bosch, HERE and TomTom among the platform providers, which makes car connectivity one of the largest and steadiest contracts in the IoT business.
A Connection Nobody Can Switch Off Anymore
Berg's forecast confirms that the debate over whether cars should be connected has ended, and the interesting questions have moved to who pays, who owns the data and who builds the modem. For carmakers, a free connection is now a cost of doing business that GM has shown can turn into billions in service revenue, provided buyers trust how the company handles their data, and the FTC order shows what happens when that trust breaks.
For buyers, fleet operators and insurers, the next two years bring more bargaining power than they have had before, because Europe's Data Act gives them a legal claim to the data their cars produce, and the US rules and network changes will force carmakers to be clearer about what sits inside the telematics box. The 583 million figure measures how many cars will be talking by 2030, but the rules taking shape now will decide who gets to listen.
