When your vehicle outlives its cloud: What happens next?

Do you use your vehicle’s app to pre‑cool the cabin on a scorching day, confirm the doors are locked from bed, or have the car automatically call for help when the airbags go off? Savor those connected, cloud‑based conveniences while you can—the clock is already ticking on their obsolescence. In a few short years, you may be driving today’s vehicle without many of the features you currently enjoy.

How we got hooked on the cloud "Connected services"—cloud-based and networked features that let a vehicle communicate with external systems to deliver apps, data, and remote functions to drivers and passengers—have been around since the 1990s, when GM introduced OnStar as an option. Those early systems were mostly voice‑centric, but they still depended on centralized back‑end systems. Modern versions, which are fully data-driven and cloud-hosted, use much more sophisticated over-the-air data links to allow a considerably better feature set.