Beyond the Lot

CX Insights - Trend Watch - Automotive Industry (ICYMI June 2026)

Something shifted in June – and it wasn’t just the gears. The OEMs that spent the last century defining personal transportation are quietly rewriting their own job descriptions. Ford is an energy company. GM is going to the moon. JLR is building British icons in an American Jeep plant. And through it all, the driver assistance features rolling out across millions of vehicles are generating a new kind of customer relationship – one that doesn’t end at the dealership. Not even close.

Let’s dig in.

| THE OEM IS EXPANDING

If you’re still calling them car companies, your vocabulary may need an update.

Ford Energy – a new $2 billion division converting a former EV battery plant in Glendale, Kentucky into a supplier of grid-scale storage systems for AI data centers and utilities – sent Ford’s stock surging 28% this month. A five-year deal with EDF Power Solutions North America is already signed. Wall Street didn’t just notice. They applauded.

GM made a completely different kind of headline. The automaker secured a NASA subcontract to supply the battery-electric propulsion system for the Pegasus Lunar Terrain Vehicle, heading to the moon in 2028 as part of the Artemis mission. It turns out the same engineering powering a Silverado can travel a bit further than anyone expected. Range anxiety hits differently when you’re 238,000 miles from the nearest dealership.

And JLR, faced with margin pressure and heavy tariffs, announced plans to co-develop U.S.-specific Defender models built at Stellantis Jeep facilities. The ultimate evolution of the coopetition thread we’ve been tracking since December: if you can’t beat the import costs, build your British icons in your partner’s American backyard.

The OEM playbook is expanding – not because the core business is broken, but because the smartest players are leveraging what they already do exceptionally well. Beyond the lot, beyond the vehicle, and in at least one case, beyond the atmosphere.

| THE ADAS REALITY CHECK

While some OEMs looked to the stars, autonomous vehicles got an aggressive dose of reality down here on Earth.

Waymo paused freeway rides across Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix after its vehicles struggled with highway construction zones – including a widely circulated video of a robotaxi picking a fight with traffic cones it couldn’t win. Flooding prompted additional pauses in Atlanta and San Antonio. The company that has done more than anyone to prove the autonomy business model – 3,000 vehicles, 500,000 paid trips a week – hit a wall it couldn’t see around.

For those of us in South Florida, this is the least surprising news of the summer. Driving I-95 between Miami and Palm Beach isn’t a commute – it’s an act of spiritual faith, complete with phantom lane closures, surprise construction zones, and drivers operating under their own personalized laws of physics. Any time of day. Any day of the week. If a robotaxi can master I-95, it doesn’t just deserve a permit. It deserves a medal.

Tesla’s robotaxi program offers a different data point. With approximately 31 active vehicles globally and just 14 operating fully unsupervised, the program remains in very early stages compared to Waymo’s 577 driverless permits in Texas alone. The autonomy race is real – and the gap between programs at different stages of deployment is widening.

We noted in April’s edition that trust is being earned one ride at a time. June confirmed it can also be tested one construction cone at a time.

For our OEM clients, the more immediate story is ADAS – and it is scaling fast. GM’s partnership with Google to deploy Gemini across four million vehicles continues to roll out, bringing conversational AI natively into the driving experience. Lucid launched hands-free driving on the Gravity SUV via OTA update. Super Cruise, BlueCruise, and ProPilot are live across millions of customer relationships right now. Each feature is a subscription. Each subscription is a touchpoint. And each touchpoint is a moment where the right human support – or the wrong one – shapes what that customer does next.

| JUST FOR FUN: SIGNS OF THE TIMES

The FIFA World Cup 2026 arrived in the United States this month – and Hyundai decided to flex its ownership of Boston Dynamics in the most spectacular way possible. They didn’t just park a fleet of branded SUVs outside the stadiums. They sent a robot to learn football.

Atlas – Boston Dynamics’ humanoid robot, now wholly owned by Hyundai – trained through reinforcement learning on real human motion data and ultimately executed the Ghost Rabona: a cross-leg kick so technically demanding it regularly humbles professional players. No CGI. Real robot. Real pitch. At World Cup at venues across North America, Atlas and Spot robots are pulling actual shifts alongside human staff, supporting match operations and fan engagement.

The campaign is called School of Football. The tagline is, “Next Starts Now.” The future, it turns out, plays beautiful football.

CX REALITY CHECK

When a robotaxi pulls over because a construction cone confused it, that isn’t just a software glitch – it’s a broken customer promise. For the passenger in the back seat watching the minutes tick away, it’s an anxious, frustrating experience that no OTA update can retroactively fix.

The same principle applies across every ADAS feature scaling right now. Super Cruise, BlueCruise, ProPilot, Lucid’s Hands-Free Drive Assist – these capabilities are live, they are growing, and every activation generates customer questions that a chatbot alone cannot answer. When a hands-free system disengages unexpectedly or a connected service doesn’t activate correctly, customers don’t want an error code. They want an empathetic, trained human who can explain what happened and restore their confidence.

The brands investing in that human layer are building the kind of trust no algorithm can manufacture. We explored exactly this in our whitepaper Where Heart Meets Tech: Elevating Human Potential with AI in the Contact Center. The vehicle is getting smarter by the megabyte. Until it develops a soul, the customer still needs a person.

Here’s to June – may your features ship on time and your customers stay buckled in.