GoKawiilOn the morning of November 24, 2025, automotive journalist Zerin Dube opened the door of his Jeep Grand Cherokee, settled into the driver’s seat, and pressed the start button. The dashboard came up. The infotainment screen ran its boot animation, blinked to the home view, and then loaded an advertisement on top of the home view. Not a service reminder, not a recall notice. A promotional offer: $1,500 in Loyalty Retail Bonus Cash toward the purchase of a new Jeep, timed to appear at startup, configured to linger for fifteen seconds, and programmed to return at the next ignition cycle if he failed to dismiss it quickly enough.
He photographed the screen and posted it to X. The caption: “Late stage capitalism popping up on our Grand Cherokee.”
Zerin Dube's photograph of the startup ad, posted to X on November 24, 2025.
The photograph captured something people had been watching develop in fragments (a feature added here, a terms-of-service update there) but hadn’t yet seen stated plainly. Dube’s Jeep had not been hacked. Nothing had gone wrong. The advertisement came from Stellantis, the company that built the truck, over the truck’s own cellular connection, to a screen in a vehicle the owner had paid for outright.
To turn it off permanently, Stellantis directed owners to call the Brand Connect customer service line at 800-777-3600 during business hours.
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.
Forty Years of Glass
The 1986 Buick Riviera. The first production car with a touchscreen.
The 1986 Buick Riviera arrived in showrooms carrying what GM called the Graphic Control Center: a nine-inch cathode-ray tube touchscreen managing 91 vehicle functions without conventional switches or knobs. It beeped audibly with each touch. Drivers complained it was distracting to navigate at speed. It was dropped after two model years.
GM's Graphic Control Center. Ninety-one functions, one CRT, an audible beep on every press. It survived two model years.
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