Why are car makers displaying ads on the touchscreen?

Jeep has had quite the few weeks. Initially things went rather well for it, because it convinced Harrison Ford to star in its Super Bowl half-time commercial, which not surprisingly was received very fondly.

Ford teased himself about his name being Ford and teased Ford itself for copying the Wrangler with the Bronco. You can imagine the marketing teams sharing high fives. Until, that is, somebody reported their Jeep was serving them advertisements in a pop-up on its touchscreen that, try as they might, they couldn’t get rid of.

They would tell the pop-up to go away and it would, for a few minutes, before reappearing again the next time – and every time – they came to a stop, offering to connect them to an operator so that they could purchase an extended warranty. Someone else then reported their Jeep doing the same.

It drove these owners mad, and I can understand why. Last week, my work phone kept reminding me via a pop-up, often mid-text or email, that I should update its operating software to the latest version – something I had been avoiding, because friends and colleagues and the wider internet had told me it would ruin the photo and email apps.

As I dismissed each pop-up, I wanted to put the darned thing in the microwave, and it’s not even my phone.

If I’d have dropped fifty grand on a new car that insisted on trying to get me to phone an extended warranty department, the call I’d actually make would be to an insurer to explain that there has been a terrible accident and that my car was at the bottom of a ravine, on fire, so could I please have the money to replace it with something different?

Thankfully – so very, very thankfully – Jeep says the message repetition was delivered in error. As it explained to American website The Autopian, the note was meant to appear once (this may still seem one too many times to you) and disappear and not return once dismissed. 

It said it had contacted the affected owners and already corrected this “glitch”. This hasn’t made everyone’s concerns go away, though. News stories, features and social media posts – both hinged and, obviously, unhinged – point to Jeep owner Stellantis’s aim to collect €20 billion from software initiatives by the end of the decade.

It’s reported that in 2023 Stellantis told a US customer “ads are part of your contractual agreement with [radio broadcaster] Sirius XM” when those appeared on their car’s screen.

And, of course, plenty of these stories also reference controversial subscription services like those offered by BMW, which has rowed back on some but not all of them.

Right now, it’s still offering speed camera information for £25 a year and parking assistance or driving plus assistant for £19 and £35 respectively per month. This, remember, is to access hardware features that are already fitted to the car. 

In other words, people’s concerns about ads appearing unwanted on their car’s screens are stoked simply by how plausible it seems: ‘It’s just what they’d do.’ You’d like to think they wouldn’t, but see how instead of walking 10 metres into the departures lounge, air passengers must now walk a circuitous 200 metres through a shop.

I would take whichever goon came up with that idea and sentence them to walk through a fug of perfume, tripping over wheelie bags that, by the way, clearly aren’t hand luggage, for the total time that passengers have wasted trudging along these curvy corridors (that makes them sound rather more alluring than they are).

Last time I was in this forced retail environment, I looked up how many air passengers there were per year, and the answer was 4.5 billion. So if one in five of those wastes a minute at an airport that has adopted this practice, that’s 1711 years and two months.

If you were in the meeting where this new reality was signed off, I’d cover your bedroom floor with upturned plugs that you’d have to tread on and crawl across every single night for the rest of your life. Preferably beyond.

I digress. I’m pleased to find that the Jeep scare was just a one-off, not something that heralded a new policy. The reaction to it should serve as a cautionary tale for any car maker that’s thinking of actually adopting it. Should – but will it?