Michael Waldron bought a $62,000 2024 Chevrolet Blazer EV last November, he was enamored with the electric SUV’s “radiant red” paint and deluxe interior with slick displays stretched across the dash. There was one big thing missing: Apple CarPlay.
Austin Carr and David Welch for Bloomberg News:
For tens if not hundreds of millions of drivers, CarPlay has become the default home screen of the center console, an iPhone-enabled grid of apps available in vehicles ranging from Fords to Ferraris. According to Apple, as of 2022, 79% of US car buyers would only consider purchasing cars that were CarPlay compatible.
At first, Waldron, an iPhone user, kind of liked Ultifi’s software, which came with decent services for navigation and media. But little annoyances crept in. Unlike CarPlay, which allows drivers to listen to recent texts by clicking on Apple’s touchscreen app, Ultifi is only able to access new messages over Bluetooth if the driver has previously granted permissions. Waldron, who lives in Iowa, could no longer ask Siri for directions to a friend’s house by name; instead, he entered addresses into Google Maps. His wife, another iPhone owner, hated its lack of Apple’s music and podcast apps.
Larger problems reared up on a family road trip to Ohio for Thanksgiving. After a warning light randomly popped up on the main screen, apps kept crashing before the display blacked out altogether. With the system bricked, no settings could be changed for the 600-mile drive back to Des Moines, not even the SiriusXM channel, which was stuck on 1990s radio. “My 4-year-old is now very well-versed in my music taste,” says Waldron, who depended on his iPhone planted in the cup holder for the rest of the journey.
Once home, Waldron’s Blazer went to the dealership where it stayed for a month as technicians tried to diagnose the glitches. He wasn’t alone: Press reviewers and numerous customers ran into major software failures and vehicle faults, forcing GM to ground the vehicle and halt all sales starting in December. As the weeks dragged on at the shop, a service rep asked Waldron if there was anything he could do to make the situation right. “I said, ‘Well, you could put CarPlay back in it,’ ” Waldron recalls. “The guy was laughing and said, ‘I have a feeling I’m going to be hearing a lot of that.’ ”
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MacDailyNews Take: While Michael is waiting hours** for his overpriced EV to charge* so he can complete his 600-mile drive (which basically any gas-powered car can achieve with one 5-minute fill up), he’ll have plenty of time to contemplate his extraordinarily poor decision-making when it comes to purchasing a vehicle.
Read more about the overall stupidity of EVs and GM’s shoddy workmanship and idiotic lack of CarPlay in “The 2024 Chevrolet Blazer EV Left Me Stranded In Rural Virginia; It broke down after a mere 28 hours in my possession, stranding me in Wythesville, Virginia” here.
For us, and many, many others, General Motors simply moves even further out of consideration for future purchases (GM never really was in consideration anyway). If GM sticks to this stupidity, it deserves its fate. – MacDailyNews, May 15, 2023
See also: Vehicle buyers consider Ford, Toyota, after GM announces Apple CarPlay phaseout – April 14, 2023
*2024 Blazer EV has an EPA-estimated range of just 279 miles on full charge
**The 2024 Chevy Blazer EV takes over 24 hours to reach a full charge
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