Imagine there’s a chip inside your tyre, writes Jacqui Barker, VP global engagement, Keyloop.
Not a tracker, not a pressure sensor in the way most of us imagine one, but a tiny piece of silicon, embedded in the rubber, that listens to the vibration of the road and works out, in real time, whether you’re driving on a dry motorway or into a wall of typhoon rain.
It tells your adaptive cruise control to back off. It tells your ABS and emergency braking systems what grip they’re actually working with. And it does all of this on a battery that has to last years, because nobody is popping the wheel off to change it.
I heard about this incredible innovation in technology recently at MOVE 2026, recording an episode of Drivetime as part of special series from the event, in the conversation with Aleksandr Timofeev, CEO and co-founder of Polyn Technology, a semiconductor company building what he calls analogue neuromorphic chips: silicon designed to process raw sensor data the way a brain processes a reflex, instead of the way a conventional digital processor does.
His point wasn’t really about tyres. It was about latency, power, and the uncomfortable truth that a lot of the intelligence now built into a modern car is invisible to the person selling it, and to the person buying it.
The software-defined vehicle conversation
That’s the software-defined vehicle conversation in miniature. We talk about SDVs as a manufacturing shift, decoupling software from hardware so a car’s capability isn’t fixed the day it rolls off the line.
But the more interesting question for our industry isn’t happening in the factory. It’s happening on the forecourt, where someone has to explain to a customer why the car they’re about to buy will, quite literally, be a different car in six months’ time.
Is the industry actually ready for this? Deloitte’s Global manufacturer readiness study, published last year, put a number on something a lot of us have suspected for a while. Ninety per cent of technical leaders at OEMs say their organisation is a leader in software-defined vehicle development.
Only 45% of business executives at the same companies agree. That’s not a rounding error, it’s a canyon, and it exists at the very top of manufacturing organisations with the budget and the mandate to close it.
When the gap reaches sales
If that’s the confidence gap in the boardroom, I’d ask retailers a harder question: what does that gap look like by the time it reaches the sales floor? The same Deloitte study forecasts that 81% of OEM fleets will be software-defined by 2030. That’s not a distant, theoretical horizon.
That’s the next few years of stock arriving at dealerships everywhere, and it means the product knowledge gap we’re used to managing, new trims, new engines, new finance products, is about to be joined by something structurally different: a vehicle whose specification is no longer a fixed, printed fact.
A car used to be a known quantity at the point of sale. What it did on day one is roughly what it did on day 3,000. That’s no longer true, and it’s not a small shift in how we train and support the people who sell vehicles for a living.
A software-defined car might unlock a feature next spring that didn’t exist at handover. It might get safer, in the case of Alek’s road-sensing chips, or a battery-monitoring sensor that catches a fault before it becomes dangerous, purely through a software update rather than a trip to the workshop.
A different kind of confidence
Selling that requires a different kind of confidence than selling a spec sheet. It means being able to tell a customer, honestly, here’s what this car can do today, and here’s what it’s built to become.
It means understanding, at least at a conversational level, why a car’s intelligence increasingly sits in sensors and chips most customers will never see, and being ready for questions that go well beyond horsepower and boot space.
The readiness gap on our side
The good news is that customers may be more ready for this than we give them credit for. Deloitte’s 2026 Global Automotive Consumer Study found real appetite for over-the-air updates and AI-enabled personalisation, with many consumers saying they’d keep a vehicle longer if it kept improving through software rather than degrading the way cars traditionally have.
The demand side of this equation is not the problem. The readiness gap is on our side of the desk.
None of this requires every salesperson to become a semiconductor engineer, and it shouldn’t. What it requires is curiosity, and a willingness to treat what does this car do that I don’t fully understand yet as a normal, recurring question rather than an occasional one.
It means dealer groups building product training that updates as often as the vehicles do, not once a year at launch. And it means OEMs and technology partners bringing that knowledge down to the forecourt in language that’s usable in a five-minute conversation with a customer, not buried in a 40-page engineering brief.
Ensure people aren’t in the dark
I left that conversation with Aleks thinking about how much of a modern car’s intelligence is quietly invisible, doing its job without anyone in the room realising it’s there.
The industry’s job now is to make sure the people selling these vehicles aren’t equally in the dark. Software-defined vehicles are coming whether we’re ready or not. The only real choice we have is whether retailers get there ahead of their customers, or find out from them.
We recorded 16 special episodes of the Drivetime podcast covering everything from autonomous busses, EV optimisation, software in the vehicle that can personalise your car as you do your iphone and of course the expanding role of AI, all episodes are available on demand to help you stay ahead of innovation across the industry.
Author: Jacqui Barker, VP global engagement, Keyloop
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