Stop Asking Cars if They’re Awake

I kept hearing the same complaint in different rooms.

Service teams couldn't activate features. Analytics couldn't trust their dashboards. Engineers were building workarounds instead of solutions.

Everyone was working around the same system - the one that told us which cars were online.

It was wrong 10% of the time. That's 3 million vehicles with incorrect status.

I was in a planning session when our systems engineer said something that stopped me:

"Stop asking cars to report if they're connected. Track it from our side instead."

Of course. We were trusting buggy vehicle software to self-report its own connectivity. Like asking someone if they're awake.

But rebuilding meant months of work. And the team that owned the broken system wasn't going to fix it.

Before committing to a full rebuild, I ran a one-month pilot.

120,000 connection attempts. Old method: 52% accurate. Infrastructure-based tracking: 87% accurate.

The improvement was undeniable. But more importantly - update success rates jumped to 95%.

Real impact. Not theory.

We built the new platform using infrastructure events instead of vehicle reports. Modular architecture. Real-time APIs first, then UI for support teams.

I didn't wait for perfection. We shipped to technical teams immediately. Iterated based on actual usage.

Adoption happened fast. Twelve business units in months. Service activation. Customer support. Analytics. Engineering.

Inaccurate status reports dropped to near-zero.
Support resolution times fell 40%.
Service activation success improved 22%.

But the real metric: teams stopped building workarounds.

The platform became the single source of truth. For 30 million vehicles.

Great infrastructure is invisible. People only notice when it breaks.

We didn't just fix a system. We rebuilt trust.

And trust, once lost, has to be earned back one accurate data point at a time.