There are some things I like about the GM infotainment system. Really, there are. Let’s talk about one of them.

The mapping is pretty good. I don’t think it’s overall better, at least visually, than Apple Maps, but its integration with the charging system is pretty useful.

It routes based on charging needs and stations better. It seems to know about more charging stations than Apple Maps. One of my favorite things is how when you plan a route, it tells you how much power your battery will have at the end. That’s pretty neat!

GM touts their mapping as being superior to other systems and in many ways it is, but one might also question the long-term usefulness of these kinds of map integrations. It’s novel. It’s useful. But I think you run into the law of diminishing returns the more you use it.

Example. It’s about 300 miles to Las Vegas from where I live. Our other EV (VW ID.4) can’t make it to Vegas in one shot and the built-in mapping was very useful in finding the best place to charge (Barstow, it turns out.) At least it was useful on the first trip when the car was new. But what about the second trip? Or third? Is the range or ideal charging stop going to change between trips? Not bloody likely. So after the first time we took that car to Vegas, we never used the car’s native mapping again (for that trip.)

A study by AAA (https://newsroom.aaa.com/2015/04/new-study-reveals-much-motorists-drive/) in 2014 found that US motorists drive an average of about 30 miles a day. Another study from 10 years later (https://www.ncesc.com/how-much-does-the-average-american-drive-a-day/) showed that the average had not risen.

This is because a vast majority of driving is local; to work, to the store, to the library, going out to eat, etc. People are not using mapping and tracking charging stations for these short trips. And once you take that road trip to Vegas, or to whatever big city is nearest to where you live, you tend to not need mapping any more, save for perhaps looking at traffic. And there’s nothing novel about how the GM infotainment does traffic when compared with the maps in iPhones and Android phones.

While the mapping in GM cars is great and is very useful in certain situations, it’s not the huge selling point GM seems to think it is. We should be allowed to use the mapping we want most of the time and use the GM map when we find it useful.

It’s a royal pain to not have access to the favorites, shortcuts, routes, etc. I’ve built up on my phone for the last couple decades and have to start fresh with a system that might be useful only 5% of the time. Then we’re forced into a split-brain situation where I can’t take note of a destination I want to save or route I want to take on my laptop or phone, then have it appear in my car. It’s a whole other world in there and makes this one aspect of driving inconvenient, inconsistent, annoying, and once in a while infuriating when the car’s search doesn’t understand what I’m looking for.

As is tradition on this site, I’ll also mention that technically, ‘data services’ are a subscription in GM vehicles. They give it to you for free for some number of years, but I can’t find any publication that says what happens at the end of the free period. Since GM is planning on wringing $25 billion out of its customers for software subscriptions and services by 2030, there’s no telling how much they’ll want to squeeze out of you to use the most fundamental app you can have in the car, the mapping.