A Feature That Became the Default
The shift is visible most clearly in how new vehicles are built. Berg Insight found that 83 percent of new cars sold worldwide in 2025 already came equipped with embedded connectivity, up from 79 percent the year before. By 2030, the firm projects that figure will climb to 91 percent of all new vehicles shipped, or roughly 82.6 million cars annually, up from 72.6 million units in 2025. Aftermarket dongles and phone-tethered infotainment systems, once the default way to bring an older car online, are steadily being replaced by connectivity built into the vehicle at the factory.
For automakers, the incentive extends well beyond selling subscriptions. Martin Cederqvist, senior analyst at Berg Insight, said manufacturers are increasingly offering core connected services free for extended periods specifically to keep vehicles online. That strategy, he explained, allows carmakers to collect the kind of large-scale usage data that shapes future product development and helps confirm how vehicles are holding up over their full lifespan. The car, in other words, has become a listening device for its own manufacturer, feeding a continuous stream of performance data back to the company that built it long after the sale is complete.
The Data Tsunami Behind the Dashboard
That constant connection comes at a cost measured in gigabytes. Berg Insight estimates the average connected car consumed about 6.2 GB of data in 2025, a figure the firm expects to climb to 10.1 GB by 2030 as automakers layer on more over-the-air software updates, cloud-based diagnostics and subscription infotainment services. Streaming video and music, real-time navigation and voice assistants all draw on that growing data budget, but so do less visible processes: remote engine diagnostics, predictive maintenance alerts and the security patches automakers now push to vehicles the way smartphone makers push updates to phones.
Supporting that traffic requires an ecosystem far larger than any single carmaker. Berg Insight’s report points to a web of mobile network operators and virtual carriers, including AT&T, Vodafone, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom and Verizon, working alongside connectivity management platforms and connected-vehicle software specialists that keep millions of vehicles online, provisioned and billed correctly across dozens of countries.
Building the Next Layer of Infrastructure
The next stage of that growth depends on technology most drivers will never see. Berg Insight expects the expansion to lean heavily on the new SGP.32 eSIM standard, migration to 5G RedCap networks designed for lower-bandwidth connected devices, and the early integration of satellite connectivity for vehicles that travel beyond cellular coverage. Those standards are already moving from whiteboards into production vehicles. Earlier this year, the electronics supplier Giesecke+Devrient, the automaker Rivian and AT&T announced a collaboration to build SGP.32-compliant eSIM connectivity into Rivian’s upcoming R2 platform, an arrangement intended to let a single vehicle hardware design switch network profiles remotely rather than requiring separate hardware for every country it is sold in.
Cederqvist said automakers are pushing for connectivity solutions that support local carrier profiles, accommodate vehicles that stay on the road for over a decade, allow for lower-cost migration to 5G, and keep service running even where terrestrial cell networks do not reach. That last requirement, service continuity beyond ground-based networks, points to why satellite connectivity has moved from a novelty into a genuine planning consideration for an industry used to designing vehicles years before they reach the driveway.
A Quiet Infrastructure Bet
None of this growth announces itself with the fanfare of a new engine or a redesigned interior. It shows up instead in the fine print of a purchase agreement, in a data plan a driver may never notice they are paying for, and in the growing list of companies, from chipmakers to satellite operators, now quietly wiring themselves into the automotive supply chain. By the time Berg Insight’s forecast window closes in 2030, the industry will have spent the back half of this decade building a communications network as consequential, in its own way, as the roads the vehicles drive on. The car, once judged by horsepower and handling, is increasingly being judged by bandwidth.