The Car That Watches You Back
May 5th, 2026Via: Nobody Asked For This:
This is a story about how a machine most people still think of as property became something else: a platform with monetized inventory and a data feed pointed back at the manufacturer. It is also about the sequence of technical decisions that made that transformation possible. The story starts, depending on where you draw the line, either in 1986 with a nine-inch Buick touchscreen, or in 2012 with a Tesla that changed everything, or in the 1990s when engineers began replacing steel cables with electronic signals and nobody outside the industry particularly noticed.
