OEM apps are not loyalty platforms. They should be.

Here is an observation that does not get discussed enough in automotive strategy circles: most major OEMs, particularly EV brands, already have the thing that consumer businesses spend years trying to build.

They have a daily-use application with a genuinely captive user base.

Charging. Range monitoring. Pre-conditioning. Scheduling. Location sharing. These are not occasional touchpoints. For EV owners in particular, the companion app is opened multiple times a day. The engagement metrics that would make a fintech or a media company extremely happy are sitting, largely unexamined, in automotive product teams' dashboards.

And yet, almost without exception, the automotive industry treats these applications as product utilities. A functional interface to the vehicle. A support tool for ownership. A necessary cost of the connected vehicle programme.

Not as loyalty platforms.

The missed strategic opportunity

The brands that have figured out loyalty platforms, the ones whose customers genuinely advocate, who upgrade within the ecosystem, who bring in other customers, do not achieve that through superior products alone. They achieve it through a consistent, rewarding, and personalised relationship that extends well beyond the core transaction.

The automotive companion app, properly architected, is the most natural vehicle for that relationship the industry has ever had. It is present in the customer's daily life. It is associated with an asset they care about deeply. It is a context where the brand has genuine permission to communicate, reward, and personalise.

But capturing that opportunity requires a strategic choice that most OEM product teams have not yet made: to design the app as a relationship infrastructure, not a feature delivery mechanism.

That choice has implications for the product roadmap, the data strategy, the partnership architecture, and the brand experience design that most connected services programmes have not yet worked through. It is, I would argue, one of the most important strategic questions in automotive right now — and one that is largely absent from the SDV conversation.

Alexandra Elliott is the founder of Alkemi Consult. She has led connected vehicle strategy and customer experience programmes for a global luxury automotive OEM, and advises on SDV commercial model design and brand experience.