In 2022, Kenn Dahl leased a new Chevrolet Bolt outside Seattle. The next year, his car insurance premium jumped twenty-one percent. He hadn't caused an accident, and he didn't have a single speeding ticket. When he called an insurance agent to ask why his rates climbed, the agent told him to check his background report from a consumer tracking company named LexisNexis. Dahl ordered his file. A fat envelope arrived containing a 258-page report. The document logged 640 separate trips he and his wife took over six months, detailing exact trip start times, end times, total miles, and counts of hard braking or fast acceleration. General Motors had tracked every trip through the car's built-in cellular link and fed the records straight to insurance rating databases.

How the System Works

Every modern vehicle built in the last ten years has a built-in cellular modem and computer chips wired directly into the mechanical controls. Whenever you drive, sensors check your wheel speed, pedal pressure, steering angle, and GPS location multiple times every second.

A central communication box inside the dashboard ties these sensors together. When you tap your brakes hard to avoid a deer, or press the gas pedal quickly to merge into highway traffic, the computer logs that specific event. The car bundles those events together into a digital summary file containing your vehicle identification number, exact trip times, mileage, and speed.

As soon as the car connects to a cell tower, it uploads that summary to the automaker's central servers. You don't have to pair your phone, plug in a cord, or turn on Wi-Fi for this to happen. The car has its own internal cellular account that stays on constantly, even when the engine isn't running.

Automakers take those files and sell or transfer them directly to commercial data brokers like LexisNexis Risk Solutions and Verisk. These data brokers run software that assigns you a driving risk score based on three main metrics: how often you drive between midnight and 4:00 AM, how frequently you brake hard, and how often you accelerate rapidly.

When you apply for car insurance or your policy comes up for renewal, the insurance company runs your driver's license number through an automated lookup tool connected to those data brokers. The broker hands the insurance company your driving score and your complete trip history. If your car recorded multiple sudden stops over the past six months, the insurance company automatically raises your rate or drops your coverage.

HISTORICAL PRECEDENT

In 1887, an inventor named Gotthilf Anthon Hasler built a mechanical speed recorder for steam locomotives. Railroad companies bolted these heavy metal boxes directly into train cabs so supervisors could watch how engineers handled their engines miles away from the train depot.

The Hasler box ran on clockwork gears tied directly to the train wheels. As the train rolled down the tracks, small steel needles punched holes into a long roll of moving paper tape. The needles punched marks that recorded the train speed, elapsed travel time, boiler steam pressure, and every single time the engineer pulled the air brake.

The railroad managers didn't have to ride along on the route to police the crew. When the train pulled into the yard, an inspector unlocked the box, pulled out the paper tape, and carried it to the company office. If the tape showed that an engineer came into a curve too fast, slammed on the brakes too hard, or wasted coal, the bosses docked his pay or fired him on the spot.

The modern tracking chip in your car does the exact same thing as that brass clockwork box. The only difference is that instead of a metal needle punching a roll of paper, your car uses an invisible radio transmitter to send your braking habits straight to an insurance office.

THE HUMAN FACTOR

This tracking system spreads because companies design the buying process to trick tired people into agreeing to it.

When you purchase a vehicle, you spend hours filling out loan paperwork and waiting in dealership offices. At the very end of the sale, the representative hands you an electronic tablet to finish delivery. They ask you to tap through three or four sign-up screens to activate the navigation screen, roadside emergency buttons, or remote app features on your phone.

The tracking feature, such as General Motors' Smart Driver, is bundled directly into those screens. The dealership staff tells buyers that tapping "agree" is necessary to turn on basic safety features. The enrollment language is buried deep in thousands of words of legal fine print that nobody reads. Salespeople also have a direct financial incentive to enroll buyers because automakers have paid dealer bonuses for hit sign-up quotas.

On the corporate side, automakers turned to data sales because car manufacturing carries tight profit margins. Selling your driving habits to insurance brokers provided automakers with an effortless, ongoing revenue stream.

On the insurance side, claims underwriters have hundreds of files to review each week. Checking an automated computer score lets an insurance worker price your policy in five seconds without having to inspect your car, interview you, or review your actual record. The worker trusts the computer score, and you get stuck paying the bill.

THE POINT OF FAILURE

The fundamental failure of connected car tracking is that automakers built safety features and surveillance tools on the exact same internal wiring.

Because the tracking modem connects directly to your car's main computer network, you cannot turn off the tracking hardware without breaking normal vehicle features. Modern cars don't have a simple off switch on the dashboard for data collection. The exact same computer line that tells your speedometer how fast you are moving also feeds that speed reading to the cellular transmitter.

Even when an automaker lets you uncheck a privacy box in a smartphone app, the physical cell modem inside your car stays powered on and attached to the network. Automakers can push remote software updates to the car anytime they want, turning tracking features back on without your knowledge or physical approval. The driver owns the physical vehicle, but the manufacturer maintains absolute remote control over the data pipeline. You cannot cleanly separate the car's basic mechanical functions from its corporate broadcast channel.

What You Can Do (And What Breaks)

You have two ways to push back against this tracking, but both have real costs.

The first approach is paperwork. Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, you can contact LexisNexis Risk Solutions and Verisk directly through their consumer portals. You can demand your consumer file and submit a formal request to freeze your driving report.

The cost: Freezing your report takes personal administrative time and requires mailing personal identification documents to third-party databases. It also doesn't stop your car from streaming records to the automaker; it only stops the broker from selling the score to insurers. Some insurance providers will also penalize you with a higher standard baseline rate if they can't access a completed driving history report.

The second approach is physical disconnection. You can locate the specific fuse that powers the car's telematics control module in the fuse box and pull it out. On some models, you can drop the interior roof liner, find the cable running from the roof shark-fin antenna to the internal modem, and unscrew it.

The cost: Pulling that fuse or unplugging that antenna kills useful features. You will permanently disable onboard navigation, emergency crash response services, hands-free phone integration, and remote starting through phone apps. On newer models, pulling the telematics fuse can also trigger permanent dashboard warning lights and disable safety diagnostic checks.

When Kenn Dahl pulled open his LexisNexis file, he saw proof that his family car had turned every regular errand into an excuse for an insurance rate hike. In January 2025, the Federal Trade Commission ordered General Motors to stop selling driving telemetry to brokers without clear consent, but the radio transmitters and computer sensors remain wired into millions of cars on the road today. Modern vehicles are no longer simple machines that just get you to work. They are connected surveillance terminals on wheels, and your daily braking habits are their most profitable product.

Stay paranoid.

If you want to review your vehicle's telematics risk or want help auditing your consumer tracking files, reply directly to this dispatch.