Your new car is spying on you

As the Strait of Hormuz remains shut, and pretty much every driver on the planet feels the effect in their bank account, electric cars have suddenly begun to look even more attractive. And that’s great. We love clean air.

But it seems we’ve moved very quickly from the simple, environmentally friendly vehicle consisting of a couple of batteries, an electric motor and some wheels, to something bordering on the dystopian. New electric vehicles are now fully computerised and connected surveillance machines that create and collect data at a disturbing rate.

We are told that it’s all for our own good – that it’s all about safety. Whether it is the £20,000 Citroën Ë-C3, that you will see in many urban areas, or the £200,000 Maserati GranTurismo Folgore, that you will see perhaps less often, EVs are almost all equipped with the latest sensors. They are also equipped with the latest DMS technology – that stands for “driver monitoring system”.

Sensors are nothing new. In the 90s, your car would already beep at you to let you know that you were backing into a wall, that a door had been left open, or that someone didn’t have their seatbelt on. It wouldn’t tell you exactly which one of these three options it was, which somehow kept it fun. It just beeped until someone, usually the driver, started yelling, and then it would magically stop.

What has changed recently is the sheer number of these sensors. You would be forgiven for mistaking some of the new electric vehicles’ specs for the description of an average submarine. Take the Chinese tech giant Xiaomi’s latest flagship EV, the SU7, for example. It has one LiDAR sensor (Light Detection and Ranging), 11 high-definition cameras, 3 millimetre-wave radars, and 12 ultrasonic radars. I’m pretty sure all we really need are bigger parking spaces.

But the most significant shift isn’t how many sensors are pointed outward for parking assist or collision avoidance. It’s the ones pointed inward.

As of 7 July 2026, driver monitoring systems (DMSs) are mandatory in all new cars sold in the EU and the UK. DMS is a safety feature using sensors and algorithms to keep tabs on a driver, to make sure they’re paying attention.

Some of these systems can be quite minimal, for example in the Citroën Ë-C3 mentioned above, which just monitors the vehicle’s trajectory in order to detect fatigue. But many EVs now use cameras to film the driver and assess, among other things, their eye movements for signs of fatigue or distraction.

In the Polestar 3 for example, a vehicle released this year, you will find two infrared cameras that track the driver’s eyes, and an additional four motion-sensing radars that are scanning the car’s interior. Fine, except that the manufacturer has partnered with a fellow Swedish company, an AI-focused outfit called Smart Eye, to regularly update its monitoring system. Its vision for the near future? Facial expression analysis, which would allow the car to know how everybody inside it feels at any given time.

Smart Eye has a subsidiary named Affectiva, which develops emotion-recognition AI systems. It does this using machine learning and data acquisition to “understand” and “predict” human behaviour. These all feel very far away from being simple safety features.

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Which brings us to the Tesla Model Y and Model 3 (2026) which both already monitor the whole car interior and all of its occupants. Tesla says that footage captured inside the vehicle cannot leave the car unless data sharing is enabled. Which means, there is a way to get those video clips out.

But it’s not only about being watched by your car, it’s also about being listened to. In a bid to make voice commands better and EVs “smarter”, in the past year several car manufacturers have unveiled their brilliant idea of integrating AI platforms into their infotainment systems. God forbid one could go more than five minutes without talking to a chatbot.

You will recognise a lot of the usual players here. Volvo and Polestar, among others, partnered with Google to include Android Automotive and its Gemini AI directly in their latest models. Audi, in its Q6 e-tron, uses a combination of Cerence AI for the car functions and ChatGPT to answer general questions. And, of course, Tesla has Grok, the AI tool used by both SpaceX, and teenagers who want to undress celebrities on X.

How this new data is processed is very much dependent on the service provider. And you will have to check the privacy settings of the system your car uses (and each of its subsequent updates) to know what will happen to your “car-versations”.

When it comes to Google’s in-car option, Android Automotive is quite clear that it saves all of your data to “give you more personalised experiences across all Google apps and services”. Meaning that where you go, and what you say in your car to your fellow passengers, or to the car itself, will affect what you see on your computer later.

As some EVs morph into smartphones, it raises the question of what happens to all the data that our new cars create. EU regulations specify that DMS data shall immediately be deleted after processing. The rules also prohibit car manufacturers from selling DMS data to third parties.