A car driving down a Swedish motorway is generating data every second. How hard it is braking, how the battery is holding charge, which parts are wearing, where it is, how it is being driven. Multiply that across millions of vehicles and you have one of the largest, most valuable data streams in the European economy.
So who owns it?
The honest answer is that nobody is quite sure, and that uncertainty is no longer academic. The question of who owns vehicle data - who can access it, use it, sell it, build on it - has become one of the defining battles in European automotive. It pits manufacturers against dealers, platforms against independents, and increasingly drivers against everyone. The way it is resolved will shape who captures value from the connected car for the next generation.
It is worth working through the claims honestly, because each party has a real argument, and then asking what a durable answer actually looks like.
Four claimants, four arguments
The manufacturer
The manufacturer's claim is the strongest in practice and the most contested in principle. They designed the vehicle, built the sensors, wrote the software that generates and transmits the data, and operate the systems that receive it. In a real sense, the data exists because of decisions they made. For years, that has translated into effective control: the data flows to the manufacturer, and access for anyone else is on the manufacturer's terms.
The argument is: we built the machine that makes the data, so the data is ours to govern.
The weakness is that "we built the thing that records it" is not obviously the same as "we own what it records." A telephone company builds the network that carries a call; it does not own the conversation. Designing the instrument is not the same as owning the music.
The dealer
The dealer's claim is rooted in the relationship and the point of sale. The dealer sells and services the vehicle, knows the customer, and needs vehicle data to do its job - to advise, to maintain, to value, to keep the relationship alive across the car's life. For the dealer, data access is not a luxury; it is the difference between being a partner in the vehicle's life and being cut out of it after the sale.
The argument is: we are the ones using this data to serve the customer, so we should be able to reach it.
The weakness is that need is not ownership. A strong claim to access is not the same as a claim to control.
The driver
The driver - the owner or operator who actually uses the car - has the claim that has gained the most ground recently. The data is generated by their use of the vehicle. It describes their journeys, their habits, their property in operation. Increasingly, the law agrees that the person generating data through use of a product has rights over it.
The argument is: it is my car and my driving, so it is my data, and I should decide where it goes.
This is the claim that is reshaping the others, because European regulation has moved decisively to put rights in the user's hands - not necessarily full ownership in the old sense, but the right to access the data and to direct it to others they choose.
The platform
The fourth claimant is the one that did not exist a generation ago: the platforms, marketplaces, software providers and aggregators that turn raw vehicle data into something useful. Their claim is not to the raw data but to the value they add by combining, cleaning and interpreting it.
The argument is: raw data is inert; we make it valuable, so we have a stake in what we create.
The weakness is that this stake depends entirely on access, which depends on how the other three claims are resolved. Platforms are powerful, but their power is downstream of the ownership question, not a settlement of it.
Why "ownership" is the wrong frame
Here is the uncomfortable truth underneath all four claims: data ownership, borrowed from the law of physical property, fits data badly.
Physical property has a useful feature - it is rivalrous. If I have the car, you do not. Ownership resolves who gets the scarce thing. Data is not like that. The same data point can be held, copied and used by many parties at once without anyone being deprived. Asking "who owns this data" imports a scarcity that does not exist and forces a winner-takes-all answer onto something that does not have to be zero-sum.
The fights over vehicle data have been so bitter partly because everyone is arguing about ownership as if it were a single prize. But the real questions are more specific and more answerable: Who can access this data? Under what conditions? With whose consent? And - crucially - can anyone using it trust where it came from?
Reframe it that way and the deadlock loosens. The manufacturer can retain a legitimate operational interest. The driver can hold the right to access and redirect. The dealer can get the access it needs to serve. The platform can add value on top. These are not mutually exclusive once you stop pretending only one party can "own" the stream.
How the lines are being redrawn
Two forces are doing the redrawing, and they point the same way.
The first is regulation. Europe has moved to establish that users have rights over the data their connected products generate - to access it and to share it with third parties of their choosing. This does not declare a single owner. It does something more useful: it breaks the manufacturer's exclusive control and distributes rights, with the user as the pivot. Power shifts from whoever holds the pipe toward whoever generates the data and whoever the user chooses to share it with.
The second is the market. Even without regulation, the value of vehicle data is increasingly realised through combination - joining data across vehicles, across sources, across the vehicle's life. Closed silos make that hard. Open, interoperable access makes it possible. The market rewards whoever can put the data to work, and closed control sits awkwardly against that incentive. Regulation and market pressure are pushing in the same direction: away from exclusive control, toward governed access.
The durable answer: open access plus lineage
If ownership is the wrong frame, what is the right one? The answer has two parts, and both are necessary.
Open access. Data should be reachable by the parties with a legitimate claim - under the user's control, with appropriate consent and conditions - rather than locked behind a single gatekeeper. This reflects both where the law is heading and where value actually gets created. Open access is not the absence of governance; it is governed access designed to be shared rather than hoarded.
But open access alone is not enough, and this is the part too often left out. Data you can reach but cannot trust is a liability. If a workshop, a financier or a marketplace acts on vehicle data, they need to know where it came from, when, and whether it has been altered along the way. Open access without provenance just spreads uncertainty faster.
Lineage. Every meaningful piece of vehicle data should carry its provenance: its origin, its path, its transformations, traceable at the level of the individual field. Lineage is what makes open access safe. It is what lets many parties use the same data without anyone having to take it on faith. It turns "here is the data" into "here is the data, and here is exactly where it came from and what has happened to it."
Open access answers who can use the data. Lineage answers whether they can trust it. Together they replace the ownership fight with something more durable: a system where data flows to where it creates value, and everyone touching it can see what they are standing on.
This is the fair answer because it does not require crushing any of the legitimate claims. And it is the durable answer because it aligns with both the regulation and the market, rather than fighting one or the other.
What this means for the industry
For manufacturers, the strategic reality is that exclusive control of vehicle data is ending, and defending it is a losing position against both the law and the market. The winning move is to compete on what you build with data others can also reach, not on keeping them out.
For dealers, the news is good: the right of access is shifting toward them and their customers, loosening dependence on manufacturer goodwill. The opportunity is to become the trusted steward of the customer's vehicle data across its life, not just the seller at the start.
For everyone, the lesson is that the question "who owns vehicle data" is the wrong question, asked out of an old instinct. The question that matters is "who can access this data, and can they trust it." The parts of the industry that organise around that question - open access, governed by the user, with lineage attached - will be building on solid ground while others are still fighting over a prize that was never really one thing.
A closing thought
The ownership debate will rumble on, because old framings die slowly and there is a lot of value at stake. But the resolution is already visible in the direction of both the regulation and the market. Vehicle data will not belong to one party. It will flow, under the user's control, to wherever it creates value - and the durable advantage will go to whoever can make that flow trustworthy.
That is the bet behind VehIQ: canonical vehicle data with field-level lineage, built for open access rather than capture, because we think the future of vehicle data is not owned. It is shared, governed, and traceable - and trust is the thing worth building.