Navigation, backup cameras, phone pairing—these are just some of the features in modern vehicles that many drivers now take for granted.

Car companies likely wouldn’t have much luck getting people to pay for them (just ask BMW how its attempt to charge a subscription fee for heated seats went). What consumers are willing to pay for in the age of in-vehicle digital connectivity is a multibillion-dollar question for an industry chasing new revenue opportunities.

A recent report from Escalent claims automakers are “missing the mark” on their quest to roll out connected vehicle services that consumers will pony up for—and offers some clues about how they can hit their targets.

“Real-world success has been limited, with many automakers struggling to translate this growing interest into a viable business model,” K.C. Boyce, a VP in Escalent’s automotive and mobility and energy industry practices, said in a statement.

“Consumer pushback and delayed rollouts of vehicle subscription service offerings in the market today point to a disconnect between what’s being offered, what customers actually value, and what they are willing to pay for—underscoring the need for automakers to realign their strategies.”

Keep reading here.—JG

Higher-ups at US nuclear fusion and geothermal companies have a message to the federal government: Invest in emerging renewables so they can scale up in the US—not China.

Both geothermal and nuclear fusion are on the precipice of being major sources of domestic renewable energy, and both are considered “baseload”—meaning they’re always on and not dependent on weather or other factors. In public statements and in interviews with Tech Brew, executives from both industries have said that for the US to dominate nuclear fusion and geothermal, the federal government needs to back them.

“The role of the federal government right now primarily should be supporting and incentivizing the private sector here in the US to make sure that we’re building out the full [nuclear] fusion economy,” Jackie Siebens, VP of public affairs for Helion Energy, a nuclear fusion company, told Tech Brew. “So that we aren’t—to be blunt—making the same mistakes we’ve made in the past with other technologies like solar, batteries, semiconductors, where we invent here in the US, and then we don’t scale here in the US, and so the factories end up getting built overseas.”

And most overseas production of clean tech takes place in China, which has taken over the green economy.

Keep reading here.—TC

A browser powered by agentic AI could take care of buying plane tickets and setting appointments—and open the door to threat actors.

New research from browser detection and response company SquareX shows how agents in the AI browser Comet can be used by attackers to access account information and email inboxes. Agents are given commands and allowed permissions that can result in malicious actors finding ways to get at your private information.

Expectation/reality. Audrey Adeline, a member of the SquareX Founder’s Office, told IT Brew that while AI browsers come with a lot of promise, the researchers’ discoveries should serve as a caution. Adeline isn’t saying not to use agentic AI in browsers, especially with internet service providers like Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge integrating the technology into their products, but she did sound a note of caution.

“Because it’s still a new technology, there are still a lot of architectural vulnerabilities that are not fixed yet,” Adeline said. “Among them are the fact that these AI agents are not security-aware. They’re trained to complete tasks to make people more productive, but it’s very easy for attackers to trick these AI agents to make them think that certain malicious tasks are required to complete whatever prompt the user is telling them to do.”

Keep reading here.—EH